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IPv4 Address Use In 2008
An anonymous reader writes "The world used 197 million new IPv4 addresses in 2008, leaving 926 million addresses still available. The US remains the biggest user of new addresses, but China is catching up quickly. Quoting Ars Technica: 'A possible explanation could be that the big player(s) in some countries are executing a "run on the bank" and trying to get IPv4 addresses while the getting is good, while those in other countries are working on more NAT (Network Address Translation) and other address conservation techniques in anticipation of the depletion of the IPv4 address reserves a few years from now. In both cases, adding some IPv6 to the mix would be helpful. Even though last year the number of IPv6 addresses given out increased by almost a factor eight over 2007, the total amount of IPv6 address space in use is just 0.027 percent.'"
Get your IPv6 addresses here: Tunnelbroker.net
They've got a ton of presences all over the place, so latency is not too bad. It's really nice to be able to SSH directly to your boxes behind your router. Every address you get contains the square of the IPv4 address space for your own use.
Then bug your ISP to give you native connectivity.
I think what was meant was that of all the addresses in use .027% are IPv6 addresses and the other 99.973% are IPv4.
What is .027% of 2**128
Here's a neat (and understandable) place to find out just how stupid it is to say that "only X%" if IPv6 is assigned: http://www.tcpipguide.com/free/t_IPv6AddressSizeandAddressSpace-2.htm
IPv6 is HUGE. I didn't even understand how huge until I found out I can get an address for every friggin cell in my body.
Weeeee!
There are several free DNS services, such as dyndns and no-ip, which work just fine for such uses.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Even though last year the number of IPv6 addresses given out increased by almost a factor eight over 2007, the total amount of IPv6 address space in use is just 0.027 percent.'"
IPv6 addresses are 128 bits instead of v4's 32-bits. I sure HOPE the percentage stays small.
It's a preposterous claim that a whole 0.027 IPv6 addresses are in use. If that many addresses were in use, then that would mean IPv6 is wildly successful
If you just consider the first 48 bits of a V6 address. That's 281474976710656 network addresses.
IF 0.027% of those are in use, then 75,998,243,711 IPv6 networks have been used, which is more networks than IPv4 has ip addresses.
The full 128 bits allows for 340282366920938463463374607431768211456 host addresses.
If 0.027 of those are in use, then that would mean 91876239068653385135111144006577417 IPv6 host addresses are in use.
What's to prevent someone from buying them all and charging more later?
You can only get addresses if you can demonstrate a legitimate use for them. To get millions of addresses, you'd have to show that you have millions of devices that need them. Also, technically you can't resell addresses.
> Why not extend IPv4 by adding more bits to the representation of each octet?
*ANY* physical change to IPV4 breaks IPV4, as far as today's applications, operating systems, and internet routers are concerned. Repeat... *ANY* physical change to IPV4 breaks everything that relies on IPV4.
> Why not extend IPv4 by adding more bits to the representation of each octet?
> For example, instead of using 8 bits, use x bits where x is specified at the
> beginning of the address. For example, you can use x=10 and create an address
> up to 1024.1024.1024.1024.
Because internet traffic would be painfully slow, that's why. Current routers (the hardware that the internet runs on, not the toy between your modem and your computers) are hard-coded in ROM/firmware to handle 32-bit addresses. They can handle 128 bits in software, but it's a lot slower. Think hardware acceleration versus software acceleration for video cards. New routers can be had which do 128 bits in hardware. Your suggestion breaks down because...
a) the router would have to figure out dynamically how many bits constitutes a data packet.
b) once it figures that out, it has to route it. Because there are endless possibilities, it has to be done in software, again slowing it down.
> Best of all, assume x=8 unless explicitly specified, and voila -- perfect
> backwards compatibility with the existing IPv4 protocol.
Wring, wrang, wrung... wrong, wrong, wrong. At the hardware level, TCP/IP is a series of 8-bit bytes. Ain't gonna change without throwing out almost every computer currently in existence. That would make the switch from IPV4 to IPV6 look trivial.
Just in case you modify your proposal to say X=N bytes instead of X=N bits, there is still a problem. You would need a "flag byte" to signal how many bytes to use. IPV4-compliant software and hardware would choke on the extra bytes in the stream. I repeat what I said at the beginning... *ANY* physical change to IPV4 breaks IPV4. Given that assumption, we may as well start from scratch, and go back to square 1 when designing IPV6.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Why not just take every existing IPv4 address and make it an alias for the same IPv6 address, but with 5 zeros in front of it? And declare that the owners of those IPv4 addresses now own the corresponding IPv6 addresses?
That's basically what 6to4 tunneling does, except that the ipv4 address defines a /64 subnet. :)
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Nope. Try following the link in the actual article: "IPv6 address space given out: 143645.78 /32s in 3090 blocks out of 536870912 possible /32s in the currently defined global unicast space (2000::/3) = 0.027%."