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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."

14 of 732 comments (clear)

  1. time to give split up some class A's ? by i.r.id10t · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
  2. This only means by earthforce_1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    My rights don't need management.
  3. IPv6 adoption by Vector7 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

  4. Re:2 solutions by Zathrus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:"Perhaps" IPV6 will solve the problem? by emcron · · Score: 5, Insightful


    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

  6. Get with the times by Royster · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
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  7. Re:2 solutions by -brazil- · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --

    The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
    --Henry Kissinger

  8. IP Evolution by tarsi210 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  9. Re:This again? by jtn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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..

  10. Well by mindstrm · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  11. Re:whats the ratio? by GlassHeart · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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?

  12. Re:"Perhaps" IPV6 will solve the problem? by pclminion · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.

  13. Re:Corporations are at fault? by tomhudson · · Score: 4, Insightful
    <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. :-)

  14. Re:Oh shut it with the PC nonsense by GlassHeart · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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. :)