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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."
I've decided to donate the ip range of 127.0.0.1/24 to everyone. By reading this message you'll automatically have the ip's installed for you.
I wish I had a dime for every IP assigned to (and released from) my devices. God Bless America!/>
Wait a second, 1 billion is a lot of IPs. My web enabled phone has never been assigned an internet accessible IP address, it's on some kind of weird proxy service. My computers at work are on a NAT. So that leaves my computer at home, and it's had that "dynamic" IP assignment for months and months. No wonder we're shrugging it off. Get over it.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Until there is a benefit, why expend the resources.
If I have enough IP's why should I bother changing.
Actually the other people can take the risk, do the upgrade, solve the problems, then the cost to change is cheaper.
Once the benefit outweighs the cost, people will do it. It just doesn't make sense yet.
ipv6 (or a similar technology) will eliminate the demand for IPs (or the demand that ISPs claim there is).
Without demand for IP space there will be no longer a need to charge ridiculous amounts for IP blocks (or even single IPs). Hell, there won't be a need to bundle home routers with Internet service to give NAT capabilities to the home.
Looks like a lot of possible lost revenue. God forbid that happens.
$10 for an extra IP is the average cost for broadband (used to be about $5), most ISPs don't even want to give you a static IP (back in 1995 it cost $30/extra for a static IP on dialup!)
I have something like 1 million+ IPs assigned to me with IPv6 and I am using 10 (for what you ask? for vhosts because that's all IPv6 is useful for).
Would I be using more than the 1 IP I am "dynamically" assigned if it wasn't "free"? No.
Just roll out IPv6 along with the metric system.
do cell phones, refirgerators, and other "appliances" really need a dedicated static i.p. address? why can't they use NAT and private addresses?
Canned response 2: NAT is only good for outgoing.
Canned response 3: NAT is an easy way to secure machines.
Canned response 4: NAT is an abomination in the eyes of the Internet gods.
Canned response 5: Even when we have IPv6, ISPs will charge huge amounts for IP addresses.
If you write P2P software you will know that NAT is a major pain in the ass and requires very bizarre architectures involving reflectors owned and run by third parties (or at least port forwarding). More IP addresses cannot be a bad thing and we have to move sooner or later.
"We couldn't care less about you other countries" seems to be the US motto nowadays.
When viewing this artical, in the browser taskbar it says 'US Shrugs Off World'...
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
they told congress that more IPs would only lead to more IP theft
*rimshot*
I'll be here all week folks.
D.J.Bernstein has an insightful rant about how/why the transition to IPv6 is going too slow while some people claim the transition is already done.
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.
Santa Cruz Operation Incorporated (SCO-3)
Santa Cruz Operation Ltd (SCOL)
Santa Cruz Operation Incorporated SCO1 (NET-150-126-0-0-1) 150.126.0.0 - 150.126.255.255
Santa Cruz Operation Ltd SCO-1 (NET-192-86-169-0-1) 192.86.169.0 - 192.86.169.255
Santa Cruz Operation Ltd SCO-2 (NET-192-153-2-0-1) 192.153.2.0 - 192.153.2.255
Santa Cruz Operation Inc SBCIS68512 (NET-63-199-9-216-1) 63.199.9.216 - 63.199.9.223
Santa Cruz Operation Inc. SBCIS21385 (NET-63-192-223-80-1) 63.192.223.80 - 63.192.223.87
.sig
Does anyone know why we need more?
The world population currently stands at over 6 billion, and growing. If only 17% of the world uses simply one extra IP, then your supply is exhausted. Of course, this ignores issues generated by distributing IPs in blocks rather than individually, restricting certain IPs, etc.
Think of IPv6 as "preventative" medicine. Sure, you might feel healthy despite having a 44" waistline, smoking 3 packs a day, and consuming gallons of lard for breakfast each morning, but what do you do when you suddenly realize you should change? It's certainly not an instantaneous solution, and it's far better to have stopped the situation from happening in the first place.
If other countries were willing/able to dis-associate their chunk of the Internet from the US's chunk, they could do that RIGHT NOW to solve the IP Address shortage and not spend any money on the IPv6 upgrade. Just cut the cables and re-assign the addresses that America previously 'owned' to other nations on the Non-American Internet. It's the same principle as addressing on a private network; you can use the same IPs as someone else, just as long as your network can't see their network.
Oh, and with NAT your networks can even be connected and still work. Hey wait, if we can use NAT to hide non-unique addresses from the Internet and not lose connectivity... Why the big push for the switch?
The fact of the matter is users of the Internet DON'T WANT to be disconnected from the American section of the Internet. And the rest of the world switching to IPv6 while the US lags a few years behind won't bring that about, either. You can route between IPv4 and IPv6 networks (that's what the protocol was designed for) and there's no incentive for American businesses to spend money on an upgrade that they'll see no return on.
Really man, find a good reason to spit venom at the US and stick to it. Attacking us because the other nations of the world want a unique IP address on every phone, car, bike, toaster, and gilette razor while we don't see the need for it immediately is just silly. The world can do what it wants and we can do what we want without breaking anything.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
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?
Just because you have a Billion IP addresses available doesn't mean you can just get any one of those from the list and start using it. The IP addresses are assigned in blocks which correspond to networks. So to truely provide addresses for a global end-to-end IP network there are going to have to be a heck of a lot more addresses out there just to cover individuals not to mention all these devices people want to hook up. So, figure one or two IP addresses per person and we are already Billions short of the number needed. Figure more than that including remote sensing devices, routers, automated systems and oh yea businesses... then we are at a far greater shortage. Sure we can just add complexity and do some address translation, but are the conversion costs really that insurmountable as to make IPv6 out of reach? Most routers and computers have built in support for IPv6, but its seems that nobody is willing to ditch the old numbers and just use their IPv6 equivalents.
We aren't going to see a major shift in the US until Arin starts pushing Ipv6. The real problem is that currently getting Ipv6 costs money and doesn't get you very far. Look at it this way... currently a Ptla /32 costs $2500 a year. But people that have been sitting on Ipv4 blocks for years don't pay anything. I know of two Isp's that would like to offer Ipv6 the their customers but because they don't have their own Ipv4 netblocks they don't want to pay $2500 a year just so few of their customers have Ipv6. So instead of getting Ipv6 and moving away from Ipv4 they are forced to stay with Ipv4.
I think that the situation is currently backwards to the way it should be. Arin ( and other Ipv4 providers ) should be charging next to nothing for Ipv6 netbocks ($100 or so) and slowly start charging more for Ipv4 blocks each year. So for the first year charge $100 for each Ipv4 block (on top of any other fees). The second year they would charge 500 and the year after that 1000 and then 3000 and so on... Until we start charging more for Ipv4 address's than Ipv6 we will not see any major move to Ipv6. The more people that can get switched over to Ipv6 the sooner the better.
DNS is nice, but how do you "name" all of the trillions of IP adresses? ConnectediToaster000034433003482774464 is just as bad as 3ffe:ffff:0100:f101:0210:a4ff:fee3:9566...
This is so incredible frustrating. Some people's ignorance is, apparently, uncureable.
Yes, there is an address shortage. It is already there. Right now !
Proof is simple. People don't get all adresses they feel they need.
Truth is, Morons like you have at some point decided that they know better than me what adresses I need. So You just claim there is enough because You think everybody gets what You consider sufficient. Elitist crap asshole reasoning!
Results of plocies like that is that large carriers run public IP services on private adress space. My company is one of them. Another example: most GPRS services use private IPs and big fat lousy NAT kludges. I personally have recently had to write an analysis about a customer's bitter complaint that he couldnt use the VPN service we sold him from his cellphone. As it turned out, he used gprs, and the aforementionet NAT kludge somehow broke IPSEC.
Suckers like you are modern day internet luddites. You have - out of thin air - concluded that last year's technology is everthing anybody might ever need, and therefore decided that further technological advancement is superfluous. And so you fight tooth and nails any meaningfull progression.