Asia Runs Out of IPv4 Addresses

ZerXes writes "It seems that APNIC has just released the last block of IPv4 addresses and are now completely out, a lot faster then expected. Even though APNIC received 3 /8 blocks in February the high growth of mobile devices made the addresses run out even before the summer. 'From this day onwards, IPv6 is mandatory for building new Internet networks and services,' says APNIC Director General Paul Wilson."

Re:Do Mobiles really need IPv4?

[CAIMLAS]

Yeah, giving mobile phones IPv6 addresses makes a lot of sense. A 'no brainer', maybe. All new 'embedded' type consumer devices should be IPv6 only, IMO. It completely avoids most of the problems associated with IPv6 on so-called legacy IPv4 networks:

* there are no legacy applications
* the likelihood of connecting, directly, with anything on IPv4 that does not support IPv6 is drastically lowered
* there is little to no legacy hardware to support.

Of course, this would require the handsets and other 'embedded' devices to actually support IPv6. I don't know if that's the case, yet.

geographic distribution

[sunderland56]

A glance at the master IANA table here [iana.org] seems to say that the USA got the majority of ipv4 addresses, even though today the majority of devices is elsewhere.

Re:So which is which?

[Anonymous Coward]

A /22 is pretty much nothing, so what you're saying is that an ISP looking for addresses can get pretty much nothing from APNIC. Thus, they're basically out.

Re:geographic distribution

[Anonymous Coward]

:) Thank you, but I'll do what my users want me to do :) Indoctrination by engineering or "religious adherence" to whatever principle is not my thing.

That and I actively dislike IPv6 :) So - I'll do everything in my power to slow down its distribution and acceptance.

That, however, is more of a bonus. If users demand it - I'll most definitely do whatever I can to make them happy.

Re:geographic distribution

[Anonymous Coward]

:) How would that happen if user has to enter the actual IP address? :)
Or do you suggest that all our users already have DNS services enabled for their local networks and just don't know about it?

You sound like a PHB :) You definitely do not sound like someone that ever tried to actually implement anything related to IPv6 :)

Re:NAT to the rescue... NOT

[AK Marc]

Unfortunately it's wrong in some places. Like listing the limitations based on the use of bittorrent. Bittorrent won't work if everyone in the swarm is NAT'd. NAT was the poor man's firewall for years because it hides the hosts. P2P can't work if everyone is hidden. There are some tricks that may work, but generally the actual number of people per address is higher than he indicated.

Additionally, if you read the article, they report that they are allowing 1000 addresses to new ISPs. If you can't set up a NAT-based ISP with 1000 addresses, then you shouldn't be setting up an ISP at all. You won't run out of addresses. In fact, there's nothing (other than violating the RFCs, which are as optional as the pirate laws) which would prevent you from setting up an entire ISP with millions of customers using one and only one public IP assigned to your equipment (the rest given RFC 1918 addresses). And even then, most often when you uplink you get the IP address from the carrier you uplink with. That leaves you with 1024 addresses to use for NAT (well, 1022 or less, depending on subnetting).

As such, his idealized 1200 per IP is probably closer to reality than his 100-200 number expecting everyone will be running P2P. So with 100 per IP, the worst case, they'll be able to handle 100,000 users. With the more realistic 1200, there can be more than a million users. They have more than 16k of those to give out, for a total amount of support with nat of 20 billion users. Oh, and if the worst-case 100 is used, that's still more than a billion people that could be supported on what's left there.

So yes, they are out, but it isn't the crisis of collapse yet.