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China To Run Out of IPv4 Addresses In 830 Days
JagsLive writes "China is running out of IP addresses unless it makes the switch to IPv6. According to the China Internet Network Information Center, under the current allocation speed, China's IPv4 address resources can only meet the demand of 830 more days and if no proper measures are taken by then, new Chinese netizens will not be able to gain normal access to the Internet. Li Kai, director in charge of the IP business for CNNIC's international department, says that if a netizen wants to get access to the Internet, an IP address will be necessary to analyze the domain name and view the pages. At present, most of the networks in China use IPv4 addresses. As a basic resource for the Internet, the IPv4 addresses are limited and 80% of the final allocation IP addresses have been used."
Try the whole world. According to this counter, the world will be out of IPv4 addresses in 768 days.
> When your WHOLE COUNTRY is behind a firewall? NAT the hell out of that!
The firewall is more figurative than literal. My understanding is that it basically bans certain IPs/domains. That can be done with a stateless system, while a true NAT/firewall would need to track all packets of all connections of all users. Not impossible, but insanely expensive. Plus it would have the unpleasant side effect of actually firewalling China (i.e. no incoming connections), whereas now they just don't let you view certain things.
The whole point is largely moot anyway. First, as was pointed out above, the entire world is estimated to run out in about 780 days, so they've apparently got more time then the rest of use. Second, the primary usage of IPs comes from blocks assigned to institutions and businesses, with the latter _requiring_ incoming connections. Could a business have one public IP and NAT/load balance their servers and whatnot? Sure, but they could always switch to IP6, which is gonna be a lot cheaper than all these NATs
Heck, they already firewall everybody -- why not just break IPs up into NATted subnets? The 10.x.x.x range should give them enough room for awhile, right?
Hmm.... 16,777,216 IP addresses divided by 1,300,000,000 citizens.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
So the world runs out of addresses before China runs out?
The world will run out of new blocks to allocate (as in "254.xxx.yyy.zzz"), before China gives out all addresses in the allocated blocks it has (as in "www.254.254.254").
Nonetheless, IPv4 can only provide a little lower than 253^4 different addresses. What makes it worse is that it's allocated in chunks (some chunks are reserved like the 127.x.y.z family - other addresses may be free but land in a range which is allocated to some company and thus can't be used by your computer).
Thus even if some providers use dynamic IP (only those machine which are connected have an IP address - thus an ISP needs a chunk only as big as the number of simultaneously connected users, not as the total number of subscriber), and lot of router use NAT (only 1 single IP address is visible on ther internet. all the machine are visible through this address and use a private address on the internal network),
in a world where everything including your fridge is connected to teh interweb 24h a day, 7 days a week, we will quickly run into a situation where no more IPv4 address can be assigned to a new machine :
- the ISP has ran out of addresses in its chunk because there are more simultaneous connection (because everyone stays perpetually connected) that there are free address in the chunk (china will reach this point in 2-3 years)
- and there are no more new free chunk to allocate for the providers (all are already either reserved like the 10.*.*.* and 192.168.*.* range, or have already been allocated to others) thus now way to give more chunks with more IP to the ISPs (the world will reach that point too in about 2 years).
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