RIPE NCC - Activities

Activities

The RIPE NCC supports the development of the Internet through technical coordination of the Internet infrastructure in its service region and beyond. It undertakes many activities in this area, including:

• Allocation and registration of Internet number resources (IP addresses and AS Numbers)

Allocation of IP addresses is important for several reasons: public addresses need to be unique: if duplicate internet addresses would exist on the network network traffic could be delivered to the wrong host. So the RIRs make sure that public addresses are given to one organisation. The RIPE-NCC does this for its own service region. Worldwide IANA assigns blocks of addresses to the RIRs and they distribute these to end-users via the LIRs (normally ISPs).

Beside making sure that IP addresses and AS-numbers are only allocated to one user the shortage of IPv4 addresses makes it important that the remaining addresses are allocated in an organized manner. For many years RIPE-NCC already followed strict guideline how to assign IPv4 addresses according to their own rules RIPE-498. As the last /8 block has be assigned from IANA to all the RIRs the RIPE-NCC has only new IPv4 addresses in stock for another 12 months

• Development, operation and maintenance of the RIPE Database
• Development, operation and maintenance of the RIPE Routing Registry
• Operation of K-root, one of the world’s root nameservers
• Coordination support for ENUM delegations
• Collection and publication of neutral statistics on Internet development and performance