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."

Comments

Normal 'net access?

[i.r.id10t]

Do any Chinese citizens even have "normal" 'net access now? Thought NAT was used heavily, not to mention the GFWOC

So will the Interweb Gods force IPv6...

[Ortega-Starfire]

Or will they just open up reserved addresses or something stupid like that?

HP

[QuietLagoon]

When HP acquired Compaq, HP also got DEC's /8 block of IP4 addresses. Now HP has at least two /8 blocks of IP4 addresses.
.

C'mon HP, be a good netizen and give back the bulk of those IP addresses. Try using NAT instead of hoarding IP addresses that others so desperately need.

Re:HP

[fprintf]

Sorry, I should have previewed!

If I were HP (or Ford or AT&T), I wouldn't be a good "netizen" before giving consideration to what the blocks of /8 addresses are worth. If they wait another 365 days or so, perhaps folks will start getting desperate enough to pay for them. Can you imagine the value those addresses will have to a rapidly expanding internet enabled population, like China, that also has the means to pay for it? It might be a whole lot cheaper for China to buy the blocks than implementing iPv6, even at an exorbitant, over-the-barrel rates HP might be able to get.

On the other hand, what is being a good player in the internet enabled worth anyway? Is there some intrinsic value in being good, or using the Google philosophy "Don't be evil"?

I say hold out for a while.

Re:HP

[Amouth]

on top of that if they would redo ssl so thatyou can support host headers that would allow allot of consolidation of webservices/sites by farm hosters..

personaly i think we are all just too lax about dealing with IP's..

In other news

[augustz]

Slashdot runs it's 15th story about IP addresses running out "real soon now". The first was something like 5 years ago :)

These stats ignore the fact that there are huge available allocations that can go behind NAT's. An ISP can NAT big chunks of its user network. Charging even a modest amount per IP would free up huge numbers of IPs. There are abandoned blocks (companies out of business) and wildly oversized blocks (MIT etc).

Plus, we've been hearing these stories for years. The idea that the internets resources are going to become ipv6 anytime soon is unlikly. So folks are going to figure out a way to manage the existing pool, where there is lots of room for improved efficiency.

Fun to keep on reading these stories... they're always written as breaking news :)

Why would China want to fix this?

[FireStormZ]

Seriously their government is hell bent on controlling what goes into and out of that nation and what better way to do that than by forcing people to use a proxy..

And what does that buy us?

[SmallFurryCreature]

IP4 doesn't have enough addresses, of course a managers solution is to put of the inevitable so that it happens on someone elses watch rather then taking the time we got now to develop and implement a solution.

IF pushing IP6 doesn't work in the roughly 2 years remaining THEN we can use the buffer of under-used blocks as a last reserve. if we use the reserves now, and do nothing then we still have the same problem, just a bit further away but this time with no reserves remaining and no work chance of it being solves in time.

You should run for president, you would do well with your solutions.

Re:Blocks vs. sub-blocks.

[LanMan04]

Actually NAT DOES provide some sort of security. That is because by default nobody can see which devices sit behind the NAT.

Well, kinda-sorta. If you look at the behavior of the IPid field of outbound TCP packets coming from a NAT/PAT router, which most of the time is untouched by the router, as well as the TTL field, you can make a pretty good guess as to how many devices are behind the router, and a rough guess as to their OSes.

The IPid field is usually used as a packet counter for a given OS, so it will increase in value by 1 for every packet sent. So if you have a few machines, each counting, you can group the outbound packets by IPid value. Also, various OSes have different default values for the TTL field (64, 128), so you can make a guess as to what OS it is as well.

See: "Passive Detection of NAT Routers and Client Counting," Straka, K., Manes, G., 2006 in International Federation For Information Processing, Volume 222, Advances in Digital Forensics, eds. Olivier, M., Shenoi, S., (Boston: Springer).