IP Shortage In Asia Just Myth, Says APNIC

rekkanoryo writes "News.com is carrying a story in which the Director General of APNIC (Asia Pacific Network Information Centre) says that the "shortage" of IP addresses in Asia is a total myth. There's also some talk of IPv6 in this article."

Comments

Myths

[ciroknight]

I would certainly hope this is a myth, but this is seriously becoming a problem. With all those new wireless networks out there, I could imagine IP addresses drying up at a pretty incredible rate in the next few years. I dont like IPv6 either though, too many numbers to make it managable. The new network admins are going to have to carry around a phone book just to know where all the ip addresses are in their network. Speaking of phones, why can't we simply augment the current IP system with an Area code feature? Seems like it'd be a lot easier than adding a billion bits to the IP address and it'd be a whole lot more managable. Just my 2 cents... (under bush economics its not even that much :/)

Re:The IP shortage in asia is a myth?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well a myth is really supposed to be a story that supposedly is true (but probably isn't) and explains something about the world or a belief. An example would be the Creation Myth, Greek Mythology, etc. This is not to be confused with fables which are more practical and often involve animals, parables which are always religous or ethical, and allegories which use characters to represent things that are explicity stated (e.g. Animal Farm).

Paraphrased from Bill Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words.

Re:article text

[pnix]

He said that around five blocks of "slash eight," or /8, addresses are consumed worldwide each year. Each block allows for 16 million host addresses. There are 100 blocks still available in the current IPv4 (IP version 4) system--enough for 20 years, or perhaps fewer when 3G, or third-generation, phones take off, but certainly more than the two years predicted by doomsayers, he said.

Did they bother to think that every year we rely more and more on computers? Just like hardware speeds and capabilities are said to increase exponentially over time, wouldn't IP usage do the same as the world continues to expand its use of computers?

I know it's more than two years, but its certainly less than twenty!

Rubbish

[lpontiac]

(Disclaimer: I'm not a networks person, just a frustrated end user)

This doesn't sound like the line APNIC peddles when people actually ask it for IP addresses. When I can get a real, routable IP for every computer on my home network, and my office network, without paying a notable sum per IP because otherwise my ISP wouldn't have any address space left .. then there will be enough IP addresses.

WAIX is possibly the largest peering point in the southern hemisphere .. pretty much every ISP in the state connects to it to exchange data with each other. Some people like to set up machines with IPs that will not be routed over anything but WAIX, for things like local mirrors where communication with the non-WAIX world would be an unwanted expense. WAIX has adopted the convention of using 172.16-31.* IPs (these are "local" addresses just like 10.* and 192.168.*) - my understanding is that they know this is an utterly broken approach, but the only way since APNIC won't give WAIX a "real" IP range to do it with!

Not giving out portable IP ranges willy-nilly is understandable, since otherwise routing tables would balloon out unreasonably. But when rules on handing out IPs to established networks are as anal as APNIC's, the only possible explanation is that they need to strictly ration the too-small supply of IP addresses.

IP shortage? Bah.

[Anonymous Coward]

My opinion is this:

start phasing out ipv4 addresses.

some EFnet IRC servers are IPv6 enabled. I find it disconcerting that some hostmasks look like line noise, especially when I'm on DSL.

however, I still want IPv4 backwards compatibility. imagine typing out a long ass IPv6 string in a console to play LAN games with your buddies...

Hell, make the entire IPv4 address space game-only and give it priority routing, or make an autorequest feature so that LAN gamers can have a single static IPv6 addy in a certain range, tied to CD-keys... can you say: instant stop to cheating, trolling, TKing, etc?

also, IPv6 had damned well be static-only, I'm tired of dynamic IPs. whatever lazy fucking penny pincher shought that up ought to be shot.

Business vs. Dial vs. Home Users

[billstewart]

(I know, I should be replying to one of the serious articles, not the funny one, but it really is the right connection....)

Ths difference between business and dial and broadband home users is really critical here. Business users don't need a lot of IP address space - they're almost always behind firewalls, so a /29 group with 8 IP addresses can handle an office with thousands of people, using 1 address with NAT or proxy firewalls to initiate connections to the outside, and maybe another one or two for server DMZs. The only time most non-ISP businesses need more than that (per location) is if they're trying to do dual-homed access to multiple ISPs, which tends to need a /24 or sometimes a /20.

Dial users usually need real addresses, but they typically aren't full-time - industry ratios used to be about 10 users per modem, so you also get a lot of address concentration. That may be a bit different now that more people are using the web rather than email as their big application, but it can still handle a lot of users per address.

The big problem will be broadband home computers, because they need real IP addresses fulltime. For most users, 1 address is enough, whether it's static or dynamic, and some of these users can be bullied into using ISP NAT instead of real internet connectivity. (That's particularly likely in China, because of the Great Firewall of China censorship proxy stuff, and just switching to an IPv6-nat-IPv4 isn't enough to fix that.) There's more likely to be a lot of IP demand from Japan and Korea because of this - they've got enough money that a large fraction of households can afford computers or game consoles, and enough of the population is in concentrated urban centers where broadband is cost-effective.

Then there's the whole network-capable cellphone business. The early stuff didn't have problems with IP addresses, because most of it was proprietary walled-garden WAP stuff, so you were going to need to use a gateway to connect to the real world anyway. Some of the newer standards are supposed to provide real IP capabilities, and I suppose that if enough people actually buy them for the phone companies to make back some of the billions of dollars they've wasted on 3G upgrades and spectrum auctions, maybe it'll be a problem, but as a disgruntled stockholder of a wireless company, I don't see that happening soon :-(. In practice, I suspect that'll mostly be a NAT or IPv6 world, and it'll be the Japanese wireless folks who push us to using real IPv6.