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.'"

Comments

there's plenty of address space

[Tiger4]

Why can't we all just get along?

(better than Frist Post!)

This is a manufactured crisis

[cmbondi]

We could work just fine well into the future with IPv4 if addresses were allocated based on true need. The reality is that NAT works fine and is the preferred solution in most situations. Yes there are many things you need a public routable address for but when we look at the public addresses in use most are either not in use or wasted. For example one client has 8 IPs and a service on each one but actually they could get away with just three because the same IPs could be used. In any case this will generate a great deal of revenue for an issue like most that could be easily avoided.