Asia Running Out Of IP Addresses

miladus writes "According to a story at Zdnet, Asian countries are running out of IP addresses. China, for example, was assigned 22 million IP addresses (for a population of 1.3 billion) under IPv4. The US owns 70 percent of current IP addresses. Perhaps IPv6 will solve the problem."

Comments

whats the ratio?

[ender_wiggins]

22million ips? How much of ther population have even seen a computer? How many can read? Just cause you have more people doesnt mean you need to have them all have there very own ip address. Then think about the same ratios in the US.

Re:whats the ratio?

[phoenix_rizzen]

Ah, but it's not just computers that need IPs. There's all the embedded controllers that need IPs, and the phones, PDAs, pocket PCs, tablets, monitoring equipment, and so on. A single person could require half a dozen or more IPs.

And don't forget the public kiosks, the commercial networks, and so on. Not all of these can be placed on a private network (although most can).

Even with sensible NAT setups, it's very easy to run out of IPs before every person has a computer.

Re:whats the ratio?

[GlassHeart]

How much of ther population have even seen a computer? How many can read?

The CIA factbook reports 81.5% who can read and write. That's roughly one billion people, about four times the total population of the US. As of 2002, there are some 45.8 million Internet users in China.

In comparison, the US has about 166 million Internet users.

think about the same ratios in the US.

Yeah, let's do that. 22 million IPs for some 46 million Internet users comes to just under 1 IP address every two people. Since the US has 70% of the 4 billion IP addresses, that comes to just over 18 IP addresses per Internet user. The US now holds 36 times more IP addresses per Internet user than China.

What do you think now?

time to give split up some class A's ?

[i.r.id10t]

Perhaps it is time to split up some class A networks so that more could be released for other users... for example, I'm sure that even MIT isn't using all 16.something million addresses their 18.foo class A allows for...

That, or one heck of a NAT is needed.

This only means

[earthforce_1]

That they will be the first on the block to adopt IPV6 of course. Being late to the party usually means you get the chance to base your infrastucture on superior technology. Both the first celluar service and the first HD television was analog based, and the early adopters wound up with inferior technology.

Of course IPv6 will solve the problem

[Drakon]

... I mean 'maybe'?
It's designed to solve exactly this problem.
it was anticipated and designed. now it needs to be implemented... and in that I wish them luck

Re:2 solutions

[rabtech]

Is it fair to yank addresses out from under those who are already using them? I don't think so.

If we want to go by the countries that will most utilize IPs, then the USA and Japan probably top the list.

The bottom line is that IPv4 doesn't have enough addresses. We need to transition to IPv6. I suggest the all-powerful, all-loving, wonderful and joyous Chinese government, greatest in all the world bringing happiness and prosperity to all its people, concentrate on transitioning its backbones and systems to IPv6, and just gateway IPv4 to the rest of the world.

IPv6 adoption

[Vector7]

Is it just me, or does no one really seem to care about adopting IPv6? The free software community has done a pretty admirable job implementing IPv6 and modifying things to work with it. If the world switched tomorrow, linux users would probably be the first ones up and running. Meanwhile, people like Microsoft sit on their asses until all the IP addresses run out and a real crisis develops.

So, maybe it will be the Asian countries that finally push IPv6 toward being adopted. OTOH, in countries like China, maybe the government would be happier if 1+ billion people were forced behind NAT and a handful of filtering proxies due to lack of free addresses. =p

Re:IPv6 adoption

[garcia]

of course not. Home owners want to use their routers and router manus have no desire to support IPv6 (as it would be nearly pointless to have NAT routers).

ISPs really don't want to support IPv6 because then they can't charge for additional IPs or blocks of IPs. They also can't force you not to have your own reverse DNS (as ALL the ISPs I have ever used have denied me).

I am currently using Comcast cable. I have an IPv6 address space through he.net. I have my own reverse DNS and I can actually show off my leet vanity hosts on IRC.

Win9x doesn't support IPv6 except through a PAYFOR version of Winsock (what home user is going to do that and when is MS going to add support, yeah, never.)

So if Win9x isn't supported, ISPs don't want it supported, home networking devices aren't going to support it (most home routers just drop the packets, I had to go back to using Linux as my NAT in order to enable IPv6), how is it going to get adopted?

Re:IPv6 adoption

[Daniel Phillips]

Unfortunately, this lack of IPv6 adoption is due to Microsoft.

Actually, it's more due to the monumentally stupid design decision of not making IPv4 addresses a strict subset of IPv6 addresses, with the result that you have to have tunnels etc to communicate between an IPv6 host or client and an IPv4 host or client.

To put things inter perspective..

[BillYak]

MIT has its own Class A subnet, which is 16 million (!) IPs. (Compared to 22mil of all of China.)

As does Microsoft, Cisco, and Apple. And I'm sure a lot of other big names.

Do all of those organizations use all of their IPs? Of course not. Relatively, probably more along the lines of "very few" or "negligable."

Sure it is an incentive for IPv6 implementation, but that is not the point. America is wasting a whole lot of IPs, and other parts of the world are running out.

Re:2 solutions

[Zathrus]

Actually allocate the addresses in a way that has some semblance of fairness to it.

Ok... so define "fair". Sure, China has 1.1B people. How many of them have a computer? How many of them even have access to one? Not to mention the little niggling detail of the Great Firewall of China, which means that nearly every system is firewalled and NAT'd anyway.

India is a somewhat better scenario really, with nearly as many people but (on average) a much higher technology level. As I recall they have fewer IP addresses than China too.

But if you do it based on number of systems potentially needing an IP then the US will still be high up on the list... probably #1. Certainly not 70% of the IPs, but far more than the population would otherwise indicate.

The real question isn't whether or not to reallocate the existing IP structure (large portions of which have already been reallocated, which is convienently ignored), but whether we should move to IPv6 or more aggressive use of NAT and similar technologies.

Re:"Perhaps" IPV6 will solve the problem?

[emcron]

IPv6 will not run out of addresses - it will use 128-bit address space. This is 4 Billion times 4 Billion times 4 Billion times the size of the IPv4 address space. This works out to approximately 665,570,793,348,866,943,898,599 IP addresses per square meter of the surface of the planet Earth. Plenty of addresses for both your toaster and your waffle iron.

More here: http://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng/html/INET-IPng- Paper.html

Get with the times

[Royster]

Classless addressing is 10 years old. Go read about CIDR if you can still find any of theose ancient documents. There are no more class As. There haven't been for a decade. Any old Class As were chopped up into /9s, /10s ... , and /26s ages ago.

Re:IPv6?

[Anonymous Coward]

You should boycott all US-based Internet services and products. That should send a good message.

Of course, good luck sending that good message when you, by choice, can no longer access the bulk of the Internet.

Re:2 solutions

[-brazil-]

The point is that they're not using them - there's a number of US companies (not ISPs) that have class A networks assigned to them, meaning they have a hundred or more times as many IP adresses as employees.

IP Evolution

[tarsi210]

It's just IP Evolution, folks.

Why hasn't IPv6 been adopted yet? Because it's expensive to switch, or a pain in the ass, or both, or people are stubborn, or....There's a million reasons, some better than others.

However, this is the sort of thing that you will see and will enable IPv6 to come into use. Necessity is the mother of invention, right? Well, we have the invention, now we just need the necessity. Running out of IP space? Sounds like a good necessity to me!

I'm not really worried about it. They'll either NAT it or they'll switch. If they switch (which I hope they do), it'll just encourage more of the world to do so. The market embraces the greater of a) what makes sense or b) what people are using. Evolution in action.

Re:They should really swap to IPV6 then..

[cloudmaster]

That, or they should just take all of the addressess that are listed in all the RBLs and reassign them. Korea alone has several ranges that are being wasted... :)

What he said...

[randomErr]

Everyone is saying they should convert to IPv6.

We all know that Asian countries should convert to IPv6. The better question is will they?

The answer is and overwhelming No. Most organizations will convert to NAT and release some of thier B classes. Others will switch to pre-existing, non-IP based, protocals with cheap interfaces like token ring(Think Novell and IPX). A handful of companies will setup a IPv6 router that will tunnel thier IPv4 traffic.

With the recession no one, especially Asian countries, has the money or time to convert.

Re:What he said...

[Eric Smith]

Others will switch to pre-existing, non-IP based, protocals with cheap interfaces like token ring(Think Novell and IPX).

Surely you jest. No one in their right mind would switch from IP to non-IP protocols at this point, and even if they did, they certainly wouldn't need to switch to Token Ring to do it. Token Ring is dead, dead, dead! And good riddance!

As I see it...

[zipsonic]

THe majority of articles/posts/blogs re IPv6 say that it will change the world and solve all our problems, but everyone cites the chicken/egg example as to why it doesnt happen.

We know that we have a limited IP space. We know that IPv6 has better security features. We know that the US is very stingy on everything it does. Articles telling us all this wont change anything.

Not trying to diminish the fact that it needs to be fixed, but SOMEONE NEEDS TO START THE PROCESS AND FIX IT!

It will take big corporations and ISP's to finally say, You cant do business with us unless you move. We need a big change to happen like this or IPv6 will take 20 yrs to become a reality... and you think we have IP problems now?

Re:This again?

[jtn]

But NAT hasn't solved any "IP shortage" problem, either. It has merely postponed the inevitable and at the same time completely broken the end-to-end nature of the Internet. Think of how many applications are broken and require twisted special cases to be handled by a NAT gateway..

Well

[mindstrm]

Technically, nobody "OWNS" Ip addresses; it is a convention we all adhere to and everything works together.

If, say, China just took a few class A spaces belonging to companies they don't care about in the US, and started using them internally, and even if a few other countries started agreeing with them, there would be no problem. As long as you don't go announcing routes to others in violation of how they want to do things, you are fine.

Nothing at the IANA forces anyone to use a certain address; they don't controll routing.. they just say who owns what, and those with the power to route defer to that to decide if they should do something or not.

Those who do not learn from history....

[Orne]

Apparently 95% of the slashdot community consists of either clueless newbie programmers, or people with huge chips on their shoulders outside of the United States....

The internet was developed by the United States using US capital, both intellectual and financial. It was a military project, then academic, then commercial, so IP address space was doled out in that order, to .mil and .gov, then to .edu, then to .coms .orgs and .nets. And THEN they went international. So it should be no surprise to everyone that a majority of the address space is reserved for the United States governments and academia (it is already mentioned that MIT holds a class A node).

I'm sick and tired of people calling for such-and-such to be "fair", where their definition of "fair" involves taking something (that cost a lot of investment) from the creators and giving it out (for free) to their friends and nations. There's nothing fair about this, because there doesn't have to be! Its a freakin internet address, made to fit an international scheme that was designed after the fact... There was no design at the beginning that Country A would get everything with 0x01... Besides, anyone with skills understands there are ways to work with the system, as also mentioned above: NAT, firewalling, subnetting...

Is it "fair" that cell phone are being designed to consume addresses to do messaging, or is that a design flaw? IMO, it's the Latter; do the same thing with DHCP and recycled addresses like any ISP. Is the US greedy, or a big corporate conspiracy to keep the asian markets out of the internet? How about it's really a case where the other players entered the game twenty years behind the times, and that's all that was left. Build your own addressing, implement it, and enough with the complaining about how the USA chooses to do its business!

Re:Corporations are at fault?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Some of those have been sold/reassigned/leased. I know, your source ought to have a current list. For instance, I recently setup a customer who has an address in the 4.0.0.0 network, and they definately aren't Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., they just had a Class C or smaller in that block.

Interesting to see the first five: IANA, Xerox, Apple, IBM, Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.

"Which one of these things is not like the other one?"... or "Which one of these really doesn't need 32 Million IP addresses". [unicode music note code here]

Greed is why we are short on addresses

[Halvard]

Yep, plain and simple. Why else would IBM and Harvard each still have a couple of class A's or somesuch. Inertia? Sure they were around early in the days of arpanet or near.net or fsf.net, etc., but they don't need that many addresses. Really, both could get away with private addresses on approximately (I'm making this number up arbitrarily) 90& of their networks and probably more. MIT's up there for address space as well.

Someone is going to chime in with I'm clearly wrong, not in an enterprise environment, or some such. Well I own and run an ISP. We light office buildings, no one has a public IP (well, some have static NAT'd addresses) so we can get away with using a fraction of the IP addresses we normally need. We are living proof that the number of addresses required really is a fraction of what most organizations use.

No one likes losing addresses from their netblock assignment. However, there is a greater good here. The technological haves or early adopters have grossly disproportionate assignments. Large numbers of organizations switching over to RFC 1918 blocks and NATing would solve much of the address shortage. It would have a side benefit of additional security as well.

Re:Greed is why we are short on addresses

[Halvard]

So, you pay for a house, and spend time fixing that house up to be the way you want it, but if you are one person with a house and there are 10 homeless familys outside, using your logic, the fact you paid for and put your own work into that hosue for you is totally irrelevant, you should be forced to share?

I think this is more akin to White colonial powers in Africa than buying a house. Seems to me it time for some land redistribution.

Maybe if asia had something to contribute or help with back in the day, they would have been given the IPs needed to do their work improving the internet. Unfortunatly that isnt what happened.

Of course, it largely was funded by the US government (they still pony up a chunk to run it today I know). But those days are over. It's a distributed system that now is used by people all over the world, with network portions owned by organizations all over the world.

Why doesnt asia convince IANA to allocate some of the unused IP space to them, instead of trying to bully space away from people that actually made the internet able to exist as it is today?

You don't own your netblock and neither do the organizations that were involved early on. There's power in inertia but that object is still moveable.

I think this is more akin to the US continuing to control things just like with naming and ICANN and all the secrecy. I'll leave bringing up previous ICANN related rants by others to the reader.

Re:"Perhaps" IPV6 will solve the problem?

[pclminion]

No one thought IP4 would run out either...

Even if there were a billion trillion people on Earth, each person would still have 340 thousand trillion addresses. Assuming you have about 50 trillion cells in your body, this means you can assign nearly 7000 IPv6 addresses to each cell in your body.

If you think that's limited, you seriously need your head checked out.

Oh shut it with the PC nonsense

[FallLine]

The fact is that the market penetration of PCs is China is less than 1%. That means that, in all likelyhood, less than 1M people even have the ability to use an IP concurrently (presuming 100% connectivity). The United States, for comparison's sake, has at least 50% market penetration in PCs and as many internet users (roughly 150m US citizens). Not to mention the HUGE disparities in even the most fundamental utilities like fixed-phone lines and power. Did you know that less than 12% of China has a fixed phoneline in the house? Contrast this with the United States that has roughly 99% of houses wired. China simply has VASTLY less ability to consume IP addresses. In fact, I would be SHOCKED if they're even using 1/2 of their current allocation. This isn't even mentioning US industry, academia, households with more than 1 computer, wireless data, and so on that is very substantial in the US. China may have a much bigger raw population count, but their wired population is certainly much smaller (especially if you look at real regularity as opposed to China's official stats) because most of them are poor, lack basic power, sanation, phone, etc. Please think before you speak. Thank you.

Oh btw, a couple links:

http://www.eb-asia.com/EBA/issues/0009/0009trend s. htm

http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/docu me nts/apcity/unpan001523.pdf

I'd love to some facts to backup your claim of 45.8m internet users in China (besides the usually inflated official stats that come out of their government)

Re:Oh shut it with the PC nonsense

[GlassHeart]

Please think before you speak. Thank you.

Please try to be polite, mainly because you could be wrong, but also if you're right.

Your fundamental mistake is thinking of China as a single country, and pretending that the percentages makes sense. You think that "12% phone penetration" means that ten people share one phone, which is completely wrong. The fact is probably that 10 of the 12% are owned by 5% of the people, and the 2% left are owned by 95% of the people. (I made up the actual numbers as an example.)

That is, it's infinitely more useful to think of China as two countries: one with a population of 65 million and two phones each, and another with a population of 1.2 billion and very few phones. The needs of "China One" are very different from the needs of "China Two".

Coming back specifically to this issue, the question is how we figure the demand per Internet user for an IP address. This involves direct needs (equipment owned by the user) and indirect needs (servers that were built to satisfy this user). All in all, the US now consumes some 3 billion IP addresses with about 160 million users, and "China One" consumes 22 million IP addresses with about 40 million users.

The ratio here is off by about 30x. That is, on average, US Internet users require 30x more IP addresses than a Chinese Internet user. The challenge here is to explain the discrepancy, and to determine if the US is wasteful. Beyond the population, there's also the question of "how much Internet" the user consumes. Somebody who just uses email obviously has a smaller need than somebody who downloads Linux ISOs.

Your task, should you wish to defend the discrepancy, is to show that "China One" really doesn't need that many IPs, rather than diluting the needs of "China One" with the sheer numbers of "China Two".

I'd love to some facts to backup your claim of 45.8m internet users in China

CIA World Factbook. It's probably your responsibility if they're lying again. :)

Re:Corporations are at fault?

[tomhudson]

<qoute> Think about manufacturing.. how many devices are IP-enabled nowadays.. now go through your list and think about companies that produce no less than millions of parts per year, and therefore have tremendous manufacturing facilities that have ip-enabled sh*t all over the place..</quote>

There's no reason why these devices should have externally-visible IP addresses (and a lot of good reasons why they shouldn't). if you think about it. Imagine what would happen if you could hack into the welding robots on Ford's assembly lines, or GE's, or "War Games" the AISC., DoD, etc.

That's the reason for 10.n.n.n, 192.n.n.n, etc. Private networks. :-)

Re:Corporations are at fault?

[b1t r0t]

BBN, better known as Genuity. It's great that they're actually using their ancient Class A allocation.

Re:Corporations are at fault?

[Mr. McGibby]

That's the reason for 10.n.n.n, 192.n.n.n, etc. Private networks

No it's not. It's for people who can't or don't want to get real IPs.

There are a lot of reasons why so-called private devices would want a real IP address. First and foremost is so that they can send out requests to the Internet and the receiver of requests will know where to send the response. Firewall all you want, but two-way communication is still important.

NAT is a hack.

OK, a thought here

[dacarr]

Everybody is saying that IPv6 is gonna solve world hunger (at least, as far as IP addresses goes). But here's the thing - has Microsoft adopted it, and accordingly made Windoze whatever compatible? Last I checked, this wasn't the case.

Yes, I know, IPv6 is backward compatible, but let's not confuse the higher-ups with the facts. Just hear me out, 'k?

Microsoft enters the picture for one good reason: they are still the leading provider of operating systems. Most people still run Windows, and if indeed Microsoft is not IPv6 ready, you're going to alienate most of the users on the 'net.

OK, fine, blab all you want about the merits of Suzie Luser not being able to send emails full of run-on sentences, punctuation errors!!!!, and speling and errors grammatically to suzielusersmom13498572349657@aol.com, but consider this - ISPs such as AOL, Earthlink, Speakeasy, SBC, etc., etc., ad nauseam accordingly won't move to IPv6 when their primary customer base is still stuck in IPv4. There's just no need to make the expenditure right now because it doesn't affect them right now.

Re:They should really swap to IPV6 then..

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever wonder why the US phone prefix is #1?

Because the telephone was invented by Alexder Graham Bell in Canada, and the US shares a telephone prefix with Canada.

They Really Have Plenty

[DaveAtFraud]

Its just that most of them are blocked/DNS blacklisted because of all the spam that gets sent from them. From my sendmail access source file:

...
cn.net REJECT
cn.com REJECT
com.cn REJECT
net.cn REJECT
fj.cn REJECT
sina.com REJECT
sh.cn REJECT
...

I gave up on specific senders. I'm guessing the spammers have run through quite a bit of the address block and that's why they're running out of addresses.

Re:They Really Have Plenty

[Kaiwen]

Sheesh! This gets a +4 Insightful when it should be -1 Troll.

Tell me how you including a few Asian URLs in your blocked list has anything to do with the number of IP addresses in Asia, please. Strikes me like saying, "The telcos are running out of phone numbers. Want proof? Look at all the blocked names I've got in my Caller-ID box!"

The reason Asia is running out of IP addresses should be obvious to anyone what actually RTFA'd -- some short-sighted American git assigned a paltry 22 million IP addresses for a billion and a half people while hogging 70 percent of the rest for himself.

I had no problem accessing most of the URLs you mentioned. If you want a few hundred more working Asian URLs, let me know; I'll be happy to provide them.

Lee Kaiwen
Taiwan, ROC

Re:Corporations are at fault?

[leviramsey]

Verizon's also part of that (Verizon having been formed by the merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE (which owned Genuity)).

Re:Crazy size of the IPv6 address space...

[Col Bat Guano]

Yes, but just wait until we get an Interplanetary Internet. Then you'll have to start mapping IP addresses to the surface area of all the other planets as well, and that's sure to thin things out a bit.

Re:IPv6 is fundamentally broken ... wait for IPv7

[Skapare]

I certainly don't want to run my DNS server's in someone else's address space. That space could die, too. If I host with someone else, what's to prevent their AS from being misrouted, and all their multi-homed connections to become useless? You can't run DNS on more IP addresses than you can put in the NS and A records, so the parallel multiple address methods are not workable. Instead, IPv6 just needs a decent highly scalable routing system that, unlike BGP, does follow the principle of keeping the end points smart and the network stupid.

Then

[geekoid]

why are vendors being pressured by Asian companies to supply IPv6 compatibility with new products?

Why is MS pushing the IPv6 compatibility of there new operating systems so hard in China?

Most new applicable hardware supports both IPv4 and 6

Don't underestimate the forward and long term planning of the Chinese.

NAT still useful

[That_Dan_Guy]

But you still have to admit NAT is useful in creating a poor man's firewall and helping to keep your private network private.

Re:NAT still useful

[dknj]

[firewall]
allow all outgoing connections
allow any established incoming connections
deny any incoming connections

[NAT box]
forward all outgoing connections
forward any established incoming connections
deny any incoming connections

hmm looks like nat boxes can be used as a poorman's firewall. now if you want to implement state based rules or other goodies, this is were the firewall steps ahead.

-dk

Try and get IPv6 support from your ISP

[jroysdon]

I called up my ADSL provider, SBC (formerly PacBell): Took 4 people before I finally had someone who know what the difference was between IPv4 and IPv6. No plans to offer it anytime soon. No demand, customers aren't asking for it (I was the first, they claimed).

I called up my T1 providers at work - MCI/UUNET and Sprint. Neither one offer production IPv6 services. Sprint was offering tunneling to a test-bed IPv6 network (on the 6BONE), but I've emailed the contact 3 times, no reply. Same with UUNET, I emailed the US-UUNET 6BONE contacts, no reply. I did actually get a reply from the South Africa UUNET contact (funny thing is I know him from Shadowfire IRC).

You simply cannot convert to IPv6 here in the US without using the private IPv6 ranges (akin to IPv4 RFC1918 address space). Why? Because only ISPs get IPv6 address space, and then they are to assign it to sub-ISPs and/or businesses.

Actually, I take that back, if you want to pay for a T1 all the way to one of Hurrican Electric's sites, you can get native IPv6:
ipv6.he.net.

I've been using he.net's IPv6 tunnels to them for about 6 months. Mainly though, I set up tunnels between my sites, so the traffic isn't really flowing to he.net's network. Think of it as a VPN, but with globally unique IPv6 addresses (which you can access from any host that can get on the IPv6 backbone or tunnel via IPv4 to an IPv6 backbone).

So, everyone, email or call your ISP and tell them you'd like to get IPv6 address space.

But here's a thought, why should they spend the time and money to upgrade their infrastructure when what they have "works just fine" right now? Are you willing to pay more per month for your own IPv6 address space? I currently pay $15 more per month for my 5 (technically 9) static IPs from SBC. I'd trade those statics for a single IPv4 address and a IPv6 /64. I wouldn't pay even more for just IPv6 so long as there are free IPv6 tunnel brokers and I've got static IPv4 addresses to tunnel with.

Re:Corporations are at fault?

[Mr. McGibby]

Ummm... why would anyone want to their welding robots to accessible over the internet.

They wouldn't, but they might want that welding robot to be able to communicate with a supplier's server. While you could do this with NAT and other such hacks, why not do it the proper way with a real IP address?