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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.'"
great, so now we're at 8 IPv6 sites, all of which are tunnel brokers!
the total amount of IPv6 address space in use is just 0.027 percent
So how many is that, in quadrillions?
The ISPs don't care if the IPv4 addresses run out. They like it because then they'll be able to start charging extra for IPv4 and IPv6 addresses whereas they've been just giving them out for free. NAT also cuts their traffic costs because it keeps customers from running servers.
Instead of waiting for demand to outstrip supply, the IANA should artificially increase demand by bloating the prices for blocks. This will cause everyone to focus more on IP conservation. Because let's be truthful: IPv6 isn't going to be widely adopted in 5 years unless something changes (and it's best for everyone if that "something" isn't a complete lack of IP Addresses)
What's to prevent someone from buying them all and charging more later?
An open market for IPv4 addresses would solve the 'depletion' problem by encouraging the most wasteful users to sell their addresses.
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.
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!
I don't know which ISP's or upstream providers you are dealing with, but in the last 2 years, every DS1/3 circuit I have ordered required quite a bit of justification for anything more than 5 IPv4 addresses. No, I have not had to pay extra for addresses yet, but I have been told by AT&T and others that /24 blocks are basically impossible to get on anything less than DS3's nowadays.
The last time I did get a /24 or larger block of IPv4 addresses was 3 years ago on a 6mbit bundle of T1's. That was a /23 for a hospital network of 5000+ internal hosts. At last check, we were using about 200 of our allotted 500+ addresses. A bit wasteful.
I remember getting T1's in the mid-to-late 90's, and there were no questions asked- you just got a /24.
Never trust anyone who takes pride in being called a 'geek'....
I don't understand why they made IPv6 the way they did.
Sure, the size of the new address space is absolutely staggering, but this was done at the expense of making them impossible for a person to remember. Right now, I can go to some internet cafe and ssh into my home network because I can remember the IP.
Were I using an IPv6 address, I would have to pay for DNS service just so I could log into my own network remotely, or keep a scrap of paper and laboriously type it out.
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.
This still allows people to remember them easily, as there is no difference between remembering, say, 189 and 857 from a human brain perspective. It's three digits in each case. And, you can go as high as you need to. You can never deplete it, as you can just keep using more bits to represent the address when necessary, and all of the applications supporting such a protocol would be able to support that natively.
Best of all, assume x=8 unless explicitly specified, and voila -- perfect backwards compatibility with the existing IPv4 protocol. You no longer need to have separate treatment of IPv4 and next-gen address spaces, because IPv4 will be a subset of the expanded space.
Why the current mess of horrible alphanumeric sequences? Why didn't they make it easy on our eyes and do it like this?
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.
> Because IPv6 was an awful mistake, an abortion created by a project group (IPNG) that had become so politicized that the best people had left.
It has problems, but I can't think of a networking protocol, at any layer, which didn't. The question is not "does it have problems?", but "is it better to switch to IPv6 than to stay with IPv4?". For a lot of us, the answer is "yes".
> So IPv6 perpetuates IPv4's mistakes and adds more of its own. It is costly but doesn't fix anything.
It has the potential to restore the end-to-end principle across most of the internet. (I can't think of anything else I do on my computer where the standards we use have static limits which are so low.)
> The existing v4 space is not well utilized. Blocks can be traded/bought/sold in the interim until something smarter than IPv6 comes along. IPv6 at this point is mainly a hack by equipment vendors to make you buy costly new stuff.
A good solution today is infinitely more valuable than a perfect solution never. Again, simply observing that there are problems with the current administration of IPv4 addresses is not useful. What might be useful would be comparing the relative cost of "fixing administrative problems with IPv4" to "switching to IPv6". In my experience, getting people to upgrade to a newer technology is a lot easier than fixing social issues.
Besides, all of my stuff (at work and at home) already supports IPv6. I don't have to buy anything new. If you invented something better than IPv6 today, wouldn't I have to buy new equipment that supported *that*?
> NAT is harmless to any application that is not broken in the first place. There is never justification for putting an IP address inside the application layer.
Sure, and running without memory protection is harmless to any application that is not broken in the first place. Those of us who have ever done any large-system design in real life have learned the hard way that there are quite a few broken applications in the world.
> Look at HTTP: It uses names, not addresses. In fact, it was a mistake to have applications resolve DNS; that should be a function of TCP/IP itself.
So instead of upgrading IP, you merely want to change how DNS and TCP and all networking applications work? Yeah, good luck with that.
NAT is fine for a typical workstation now but I think it is a bad idea to build assumptions about the way applications work into network architecture.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
While China and the US consume the world's resources, even the virtual ones the rest of the world is trying to adopt more efficient methods? Same old familiar story.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
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?
Technoli
Why would you use addressing to keep un-authorized traffic from your computers. That is what a firewall is for. The whole NAT thing is really frustrating if you are trying to do any push application, VPN, video-conferencing...etc. Yes there are ways to cope, but why port forward when you could open ports in a firewall?
It's perfectly fine to make assumptions, in fact it's part of designing stuff. You can't know everything in advance.
;) ) the designer was.
;) ).
You WILL have to make assumptions anyway - after all you aren't going to ask for 2 billion IP addresses for the hospital. Even if someone argues that in the future some applications may require machines to have thousands of IP addresses, but as a designer you are going to say "Even if that's the case, a hospital is unlikely to want that app, or by that time, the hospital and the world would have gone to IPv6".
How good the assumptions are, shows you how good (or lucky
It's perfectly reasonable to assume that most computers in the hospital should never need to have outsiders able to connect directly to them.
This may not be true for universities, but it is likely to be even more true for banks - only a very few ways in and out.
Many universities have an open campus, and outsiders can walk to any building and try to enter them, and the buildings themselves are designed with multiple entry points. Banks in contrast are desigend to have just a few entry points (that's why the crooks often make their own entry points