Well, you have to understand that traceroutes are replied by routers, and routers might choose to prioritise ICMP (the protocol used by traceroute replies and ping) lower than normal traffic. So you should only use traceroutes to get an idea of the path the data takes, not the health of that path.

I'm a network engineer at an ISP, so I would say I have a bit of experience with this from both ends of the table. First of all, there's a difference between your broadband connection speed and your perceived rate. Your broadband connection might be capped to what you pay for, and, assuming your last-mile medium can handle that speed, that only means that you will never actually go beyond your connection speed.

Now as we know, the internet is a complicated network of interconnected systems. You are connected via your ISP's backbone to the other systems (ISPs, enterprises, content providers, etc.) via a number of internet peering points. These peering points have their own connection speed (typically 1 Gbit/s or 10 Gbit/s, although higher exist), and may or may not be utilised to their maximum extent at any point of time. This means that you may have your full data rate available to some destinations, while others may take a congested route.

You mention testing, and your frustration is very reasonable. There are testing sites out there, but you never have any idea about how many else might be testing at the same time, or how much load there is on the server at the moment of the test. If you are unlucky, you might also be limited by your hardware, your operating system (TCP Window Size, receive buffers and similar might not be tuned properly), or your router.

I would say your best choice would be to download as much as possible from as many sources as possible (bittorrent is excellent for this, but may be throttled by evil ISPs), and do this over a couple of days to get an average indication of how much your connection is capable of delivering.

If you have a server on some remote location via the internet, you can use programs like iperf to make a bandwidth test, but such a test is not exactly precise when you have no idea how the intermediate networks are.

In short, it's just too early to tell. Just because the RIRs ran out of addresses, it doesn't mean that the LIRs have yet (the ISPs).

Based on my experience as a network engineer at an ISP, the following is happening already:

Small ISPs and ISPs that have not been in the business for a long time* have either run out or are on the verge of doing so. They are doing the following:

  * Purchasing legacy IPv4 addresses from enterprises with /16 networks from the old days where available.
  * Deploying CGN-like solutions for their end-customers if their end-customers are residential users.

Larger ISPs and older ISPs with allocations from ye old pre-RIR days continue to hold addresses and are often able to free large quantities of addresses from old deployments. Mind you, a lot of public IPv4 space have been "wasted" on infrastructure addressing, and management of devices that were not even connected to the internet. Devices such as modems, DSLAMs, CPEs and similar.

One could easily speculate that the business of ISPs will be severely affected in the future, as customers will go to the old providers that have plenty of v4-space available at the cost of newer players who followed the RIR regulations of only applying for the address space they needed based on relative short-term predictions.

If you are a registered LIR you will see a flood of SPAM from so-called IP brokers who are trying to purchase unused IPv4 space in hope of selling this to LIRs in need. That market will probably become quite desperate in the coming years.

Oh, and by the way, I see no evidence that IPv6 deployment is taking any noticeable speed.

*) Long as in they were in the game when classfull allocations were made.

Well, if by "run out" you mean have no addresses left at all, you are correct. Subdividing the number of LIRs by the number of possible /22 in the remaining /8, they will not run out, but once you get your final /22, there are no more IPv4 addresses to get. The remaining addresses are yet to have their purpose declared, and I cannot imagine that they will be allocated in any way resembling current address policies. Within RIPE policy, the remaining addresses in the final /8 are reserved for unforeseen events, whatever that may be...

I call bullshit on your bullshit.

APNIC is the fastest growing RIR out there, with developing markets like China and India burning IP addresses like crazy. These markets will grow beyond what we have seen already, simply because more people are getting internet access daily.

Sure, you can do carrier-grade NAT, Large Scale NAT and whatever the appropriate name of ISP-level NAT is these days, but for a market of the size of China, a /22 only gets you so far.

According to data from the CNNIC - China Network Information Center - the number of broadband users in China is currently around 457 million. In very round numbers, that gives us only a third of the entire population, and with a growth of 48% per year, it's very obvious why a /22 doesn't last very long at all.

Before you even mention it, the /22 is per LIR, but there are not that many LIRs in China due central government control.

Online business in China is striving too, and you just can't build up a website without routable addresses.