IPv4 Address Use In 2008 258
An anonymous reader writes "The world used 197 million new IPv4 addresses in 2008, leaving 926 million addresses still available. The US remains the biggest user of new addresses, but China is catching up quickly. Quoting Ars Technica: 'A possible explanation could be that the big player(s) in some countries are executing a "run on the bank" and trying to get IPv4 addresses while the getting is good, while those in other countries are working on more NAT (Network Address Translation) and other address conservation techniques in anticipation of the depletion of the IPv4 address reserves a few years from now. In both cases, adding some IPv6 to the mix would be helpful. Even though last year the number of IPv6 addresses given out increased by almost a factor eight over 2007, the total amount of IPv6 address space in use is just 0.027 percent.'"
Artificially Increase Demand (Score:5, Interesting)
Why are they still available? (Score:5, Interesting)
What's to prevent someone from buying them all and charging more later?
An open market for IPv4 addresses would solve the 'depletion' problem by encouraging the most wasteful users to sell their addresses.
Re:there's plenty of address space (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know which ISP's or upstream providers you are dealing with, but in the last 2 years, every DS1/3 circuit I have ordered required quite a bit of justification for anything more than 5 IPv4 addresses. No, I have not had to pay extra for addresses yet, but I have been told by AT&T and others that /24 blocks are basically impossible to get on anything less than DS3's nowadays.
The last time I did get a /24 or larger block of IPv4 addresses was 3 years ago on a 6mbit bundle of T1's. That was a /23 for a hospital network of 5000+ internal hosts. At last check, we were using about 200 of our allotted 500+ addresses. A bit wasteful.
I remember getting T1's in the mid-to-late 90's, and there were no questions asked- you just got a /24.
Re:Artificially Increase Demand (Score:3, Interesting)
If I was an IPV6-hater, I couldn't come up with a better put-down of IPV6... that it's so pitiful that the only way to get quick adoption is to artificially kill the competition. Sounds like a Microsoft tactic.
I'm neutral on IPV6; when it becomes necessary, I'll switch. I'm running linux, which is ready for IPV6. We will exhaust IPV4 adress space in a few years, unless ISPs go NWN (Nuts With NAT). Reclaiming /8's from the likes of GE and Compaq (Compaq has 2 /8's; 16 million addresses) may buy another couple of years, but it only delays the inevitable.
Re:Artificially Increase Demand (Score:5, Interesting)
Because let's be truthful: IPv6 isn't going to be widely adopted in 5 years unless something changes (and it's best for everyone if that "something" isn't a complete lack of IP Addresses)
It's already enabled by default in Linux distributions and Windows Vista and Server 2008. The major backbones should be able to handle it. Many businesses use proxy and other gateway servers for intranet-to-internet access, so if a company is not ready to migrate the intranet to IPv6 right away they can just put it on their proxy, gateway and public servers.
I'm not saying it will happen, but I don't think the obstacles are technical at this point. I think what needs to change is to put all the porn on IPv6-only servers. Or YouTube, FaceBook, MySpace, etc.. Okay not literally, but either the customers or the service needs to be accessible by IPv6 only before it make sense for everyone to make the effort. I'm guessing it will be forced when governments or militaries have large masses of users on IPv6 and the IPv6-IPv4 gateways start getting overloaded.
Re:Why did they do it this way? (Score:5, Interesting)
They made it that way because it's similar in structure to IPv4 and made it long not to make 2^128 addressable devices but to make (theoretically up to) 2^64 collision domains with the possibility for 2^63 globally Unique IDentifiers and 2^63 non-globally-unique ID's. But a lot of people are going to ignore the global ID part and use (network)::1, (network)::2, etc. or have fun with hex letters with (network)::dead:beef and such. (Luckily--actually by design--these simplified IPv6 addresses will usually happen to be be in the non-globally-unique range.)
They intend to waste a lost of potential addresses to make routing tables simpler. Ideally the IPv6 network map will be a hierarchical structure of networks.
If you don't have DNS handy there are a growing number of peer-to-peer name resolution protocols that I expect will become more popular with IPv6 addressing.
So the answer is that the "horrible alphanumeric sequences" are designed to make easy-on-core-routers hierarchical routing feasible while squaring the theoretical maximum number of addressable hosts. And they really expect people to use managed or peer name resolution, anyway.
No need for IPv6, ever (Score:1, Interesting)
Because IPv6 was an awful mistake, an abortion created by a project group (IPNG) that had become so politicized that the best people had left. The remaining participants were hardly even the B team; they were F Troop. IPv6 was a mashup of two undergrad-level hacks, Steve's IP and Paul's IP, by Steve Deering and Paul Francis. Steve has disclaimed IPv6 and Paul's in a daze. All this was done before "ISP" was a household word -- it was still the NSF's private network.
So IPv6 perpetuates IPv4's mistakes and adds more of its own. It is costly but doesn't fix anything.
The existing v4 space is not well utilized. Blocks can be traded/bought/sold in the interim until something smarter than IPv6 comes along. IPv6 at this point is mainly a hack by equipment vendors to make you buy costly new stuff.
NAT is harmless to any application that is not broken in the first place. There is never justification for putting an IP address inside the application layer. Look at HTTP: It uses names, not addresses. In fact, it was a mistake to have applications resolve DNS; that should be a function of TCP/IP itself.
Re:tunnelbroker.net (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:there's plenty of address space (Score:2, Interesting)
Try running more than one HTTPS server behind a single external address and see how wonderful you think NAT is then.
Holy Shit (Score:2, Interesting)
I had no idea exactly how big either. From your link:
[...]imagine the IPv4 address space is the 1.6-inch square above. In that case, the IPv6 address space would be represented by a square the size of the solar system.
Consumer Routers and IPv6? (Score:2, Interesting)
When will consumer grade routers support IPv6?
When I can go and get a netgear, linksys, or dlink router that supports IPv6 then I'd hope that I can get IPv6 connectivity from my ISP. (QWest)
I'm running Vista and Linux here at home, and could operate on ipV6 without any issues right now, except that I guess most software is only configured to talk ipv4. (Does Firefox attempt to talk to any ipV6 locations?)