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US Shrugs Off World's IP Address Shortage
Clifton Griffin writes "C|Net has an article stating that the U.S. isn't making the push for IPv6 like others are even though the networking appliances and operating systems are ready for it. It goes on to explain that North America has 70% of the Internet address space and that there is a total of 1 billion IPs left, which may sound like a lot but considering we now have Internet-enabled cellphones and VoIP, it really isn't."
They only need dedicated static IP addresses if they are going to accept incoming IP connections from other networks without some kind of port forwarding. I do kind of like accepting incoming calls on my cell phone and I would kind of like the Internet protocols to be at least as flexible as the phone network. We should not rely on the wirleless telcoms to say who we can connect to and for what services. They will find ways to make it expensive. It is better that they provide the pipes and get the hell out of the way.
I work for an ISP. One of my responsibilites is to manage our IP space (~/16). I am tired of dealing with IP justification, ARIN and customers who want to have public IPs on their office printer farm. Double and yes, sometimes triple NAT in order to get customer networks to talk to monitoring infrastructure. The sooner IP6 gets here the better.
Because the way IPs where shared out earlier (class-based, remember good 'ole a/b/c) alot of people got 16,000 IPs just becase they need 257 IPs...
The planning didn't really hold water when TCP/IP became mainstream...
Look at the low-end of the IP-range (where most of the big assignements are), IBM are assigned 9.0.0.0/8, leaving them with 255^3 (- unusuables) 16 million addresses. That's enough for a small country. Ironically they don't even use them for their own website which is hosted on 129.42.0.0/16 which is a different subnet also owned by IBM so add another 16,000 addresses to those 16 million and probably countless other subnets held by IBM or IBM subsiduaries in different parts of the world...
Get the picture now?
Having a static public IP can be extremely handy though. Whenever I have a cool graphic or whatnot I want my friends to see, I just stick it up on the webserver and send the email in a link.
Funny, I have this with a dynamic IP right now.. in fact they can change my IP address every hour and it will still work...
www.dyndns.org is your friend.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Someone who works for IBM told me that their internal network is called the '9.' network.
So called because all the dotted ip addresses beginng with 9, (i.e.
9.0.0.1 through 9.255.255.254 belong to them).
Thats 0.4% of the ENTIRE IPV4 address space, assigned to one company. IRC, MIT has a similar allocation...