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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."
Also, the Iraqi Information Minister has once again emphasized that there are NO American tanks or forces in the city of Baghdad.
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
However, there is an overabundance of users.
Exec: No shortage of Net addresses
/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.
By John Lui
Special to CNET News.com
June 24, 2003, 6:04 PM PT
http://news.com.com/2100-1028-1020653.html
The idea that there is an Internet address shortage looming in Asia or any part of the world is "misinformation," according to a senior executive at the body responsible for Internet addresses in the Asia-Pacific region.
Paul Wilson, director general of APNIC (Asia Pacific Network Information Centre), which distributes and registers Internet address resources in that region, denies the shortage, saying that it will take one or even two decades before the current address system runs out.
"The source of the rumor has been one I've been tackling for the last five years, since I started in this position at APNIC," he said.
APNIC is one of four regional Internet registries currently operating. It provides allocation and registration services that support the operation of the Internet globally. The registry gets blocks of addresses from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, or IANA, in the United States before allocating these to Asia-Pacific Internet service providers and other bodies that ask for them.
Some industry analysts have predicted that IP (Internet Protocol) addresses will run out in as little as two years, as more people get access. The experts also point to the historical imbalance in the way addresses have been issued, with the United States grabbing the most, leaving little for the burgeoning Internet masses of China.
The sums just don't add up, Wilson said.
He said that around five blocks of "slash eight," or
Wilson cites several reasons for the birth of the myth of the IP address shortage and the related idea that Asia is a latecomer to the IP address buffet.
"There is a lingering perception that maybe APNIC has been difficult to get addresses from in the past, and people will simply look at the number of addresses allocated in different parts of the world and conclude that somehow things are different in the Asia-Pacific (region). Historically, they were different, but in today's world, they are not," he said.
Today, any organization applying for addresses plays by the same rules, regardless of which country it is from, he said.
"The blocks are allocated as they are required. So we don't have a set of addresses earmarked for the Asia-Pacific. There is no pre-allocation for the region which can run out. When addresses are not available, there will be no more addresses left for the whole world," he said.
The shift to IPv6
There are several good reasons to adopt IPv6 worldwide, he said, but he also hoped that there would be less lobbying from parties with a vested interest in pushing rapid adoption.
He warned of the adverse effect that could occur if panicked companies spent large sums on IPv6 networking hardware.
"The danger of doing that--if you promote that IP addresses are going to run out in a few years, then two or three years will pass, there will be no address shortage. Then what will people think about it?" he said.
However, he added that in the last two years, due to the efforts of APNIC and other bodies, such messages of doom have grown fainter.
In the last few years, the governments of Korea, China and Japan have been strong supporters of IPv6, their efforts strongly backed by domestic network equipment manufacturers and bodies such as the IPv6 Forum.
Equipment makers naturally want ISPs and enterprises to spend money to upgrade to IPv6-compatible products, while Asian governments have felt the new numbering system, with its hugely expanded address space, gave them
"There is no IP addresses shortage. We have more than 300 spare class A networks." - Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
Sometimes I think it is ok to exagerrate the urgency of a problem. People were predicting that Y2K would be the end of the world which was probably a little extreme (picture Simpsons episode with plains falling straight out of the sky). Did it help get stuff done, though? Definitely. So now you tell the executives that the world will end if we don't go to IPv6 and see what happens. Who cares if the truth is 2 or 10 years away.
The US has no shortage of IP. Perhaps they could borrow some from us...
Oh, wait - you meant *internet protocol* and not *intellectual property*...
Nevermind...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
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
I was so saddened by this story that I have started taking up a collection in the office. So far I've collected more than 500 IP addresses to send not counting an entire block of 10.100.x.x
Woverly Harris Gooch, IV CTO American Fire and Bomb, LLC
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.
APNIC is just a letter switch away from PANIC. Not exactly an organization I'd put a lot of faith in... :)
The reality is that broadband adoption is slower than anticipated and not everybody in Asia wants or can afford a computer. Not everyone who gets a cell phone wants to surf on it.
The implementation of IPv6 is to prevent the problem before it occurred.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Asia is a hopeless lie made up by the governemnt to justify military spending. Have you notived that the majority of wars in the past 50 years have been fought in this mythological continent?
It's quite obvious that it doesn't exist! Has anyone ever been there? Of course not! Do people come from there? No. We're meant to assume that all these Asians come from Asia. Hence the name. Well, these people are Asian-Americans! They come from America! Ask one next time you meet him. Ask where he is from. He'll say America (Unless you live in Europe or something that is).
As soon as we accept that Asia doesn't exist, we'll be able to free up all the IP addresses that have been assigned for use by the part of the world that does exist.
that is the same as adding another digit to the 2-digit representation of years. yes, it will solve the problem at hand, but while you are at it, you might as well redo the system, since you are going to have to change anyway.
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
Adding area code features means now you have relativity playing a part in addresses -- 5.5.5.5 would no longer be unique, it could mean any one of hundreds of computers, depending on the area code. So unless you explictly use the area code every time (which, would be the same as using longer network names, which you want to avoid) you're going to run into problems. IN the tradeoff of short network address vs unqiueness, I'd take uniqueness every time.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
China was about to impose a 1 IP address per married couple law.
You could argue there's a shortage of IPv4 addresses everywhere as long as it involves more than the most trivial amount of effort or any cost to get hold of them.
IPv6 is very easy to set up and run on top of ipv4. More and more people are doing it and the most effort you have to do it enable the option in your kernel.
Running ipv6 on top of your existing ipv4 address is as simple as these 5 shell commands
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux+IPv6-HOWTO/configu ring-ipv6to4-tunnels.html
People in asia have NAT boxes too. That will keep them connected for a while, before the world moves to IPv6(if?). For phones and toasters with IPv6 addresses they can tunnel over IPv4 as I do today with my IPv6 network at home.
What people seem to be missing in this is that there's a lot of space still around (100 /8's if the Director is to be believed), which is not allocated to *anyone* right now. If Asias use of IP space grows more rapidly than the US', then APNIC will simply ask for new allocations more often than ARIN would.
I can see running out of space being a concern during the 'net boom, since routing tables and IP space requests were growing exponentially during that time. But, the growth of the routing table has slowed down from that rate (see http://bgp.potaroo.net/), so the time when we'll run out has moved much farther back. We'll need to move to v6 eventually, sure, but I don't think it'll happen for 10 or so years.
"Here, in this remote village in China, some children only get 1 or 2 IP address. They can go hours without checking slashdot. The good news is, you can help, for as little as 1 or 2 IP address a week, this child could troll as often as any other child in the world."
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If I surf from my cell phone, am I really needing an IP address, or it it mux'd through the cell carrier? If I do have an IP address, then its a waste - the cell carrier could mux several web sessions through the single address.
"Stop whining!" - Arnold, as Mr. Kimble
(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.
Nice plan, except for the fact that flawed MTAs like MS Exchange don't send a fully qualified domain name per default.
Where a real MTA would send HELO/EHLO real.full.domain, Exchange only sends the hostname. Thus the reverse lookup fails miserably.
If you're running a mail server for thousands of users, you would soon enough have thousands of disgruntled people. A lot, and I mean a lot of mail servers are running Exchange with the default settings. This means perfectly legit mail is dropped.
And Exchange admins being pretty daft, of course it's your server that's misconfigured. Trying to educate them otherwise is an exercise in futility. So, no.. this is not a viable option.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
We're talking about the policies of the Regional Internet Registry in the Asia Pacific region, which are decided by the consensus of the industry and implemented by the body (based in Australia) and the National Internet Registries (based on their respective countries), using exactly the same IP space which the rest of us use.
That's an important one, people - we're all going to run out at the same time. I never got this "IP Shortage in Asia" stuff because their shortage is our shortage, whoever "we" are.
And this guy posts a one liner comparing it to the reaction of the Chinese government to SARS, hits "submit" and gets modded +5, Insightful.
I'm not in the habit of criticising moderation - it's supposed to knock out trolls, not decide whose IQ is biggest - but jeez. Am I the only one who doesn't get this?
> When that final address is used up in a couple of years, the online world will grind to a halt. And perhaps, so will the economies of the three North Asian nations.
I don't mean to downplay the seriousness of this situation, which I doubt, but the online world will not "grind to a halt." Will all of the existing servers fail when that happens? No way. The only thing that will stop is growth, which is still a problem, but won't bring down the 'Net.
I still contend that Asia only needs one 1 IP address... then, NAT the entire country. This solves many problems ...
1. They're all communists anyway and if all traffic went through one IP, they'd have better control over their people. Government wins.
2. No more problems with reaching the limit of ipv4. Millions of addresses would be free'd from Asia for the benefit of the rest of the world. The entire world wins.
3. Since most spam originates in China, and if they all go down to one big NAT box somewhere, then we'd be able to eliminate almost all spam by simply blocking Asia's IP address. We all win!
Looks like a win-win-win situation to me... Lets get onto these metrics, shift the paradigms, and leverage the synergy we are presented with.
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I seem to recall much muttering about this being the only reason for buying Compaq.
Well I know I wouldn't buy a Compaq unless it came with a class A network...
Fine, you waste yours like that if you want. When I get v6 every atom in my computer is going to get its own IP.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
Bill Stewart
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