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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."
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 :/)
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
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.
(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.