At Current Rates, Only a Few More Years' Worth of IPv4 Addresses

An anonymous reader excerpts from an interesting article at Ars Technica, which begins "There are 3,706,650,624 usable IPv4 addresses. On January 1, 2000, approximately 1,615 million (44 percent) were in use and 2,092 million were still available. Today, ten years later, 2,985 million addresses (81 percent) are in use, and 722 million are still free. In that time, the number of addresses used per year increased from 79 million in 2000 to 203 million in 2009. So it's a near certainty that before Barack Obama vacates the White House, we'll be out of IPv4 address[es]. (Even if he doesn't get re-elected.)"

Comments

Don't say "NAT"

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we start the discussion by not immediately going to the "NAT will save us" argument? Just accept that while NAT deployments might put it off, IPv6 deployment is inevitably necessary.

Re:Don't say "NAT"

[growse]

So we go through a huge difficult, expensive process to save us, what? A couple of years? Why bother?

Re:Don't say "NAT"

[sopssa]

Seeing the state of IPv6 and how many devices still don't support it, I think thats a pretty good idea. That being said, IPv6 support should be fully done in new devices, OS and programs already, because you need to give some time for old devices too so they can still work under IPv4.

But on another thing, I really doubt we are just a few years ago from IPv4 addresses going out of stock. There's still many /8 unallocated to anyone, most ISP's still give their users 5 ip addresses on home lines and from most hosting companies you can buy new ip's for $1-3 per piece. If we will be running out of them, we will first see hosting companies upping their prices and home ISP's limiting how many IP's they give to customers. And that will come far before we're actually out of address space.

Re:Don't say "NAT"

[Hatta]

It'll be easier to give everyone a block of ipv6 addresses than it will be to take away legacy ipv4 allocations.

Re:Don't say "NAT"

[Jeremi]

There is no scarcity of the "resource" to begin with, only design flaws

The scarcity may be caused by design flaws, but that doesn't mean the scarcity doesn't exist.

Re:Don't say "NAT"

[mcrbids]

Let's say that you get all these companies to give up ALL their addresses. You've postponed the problem by about 18 months! Whoopee!

The thing is, technology tends to grow logarithmically, which is why we have things like Benford's Law. The problem shouldn't be being solved now, while we're at the 90% level, the problem should have been solved long ago, back when we were at about the 10-20% level, because the actual halfway mark as a function of time is somewhere near 20-25% completion!

That IPV6 has been bungled so bad is a consequence of the Second System effect and perhaps a bit of design by committee.

In any event, IPV6 fails to solve a couple of fundamental problems:

1) Piss poor backwards compatibility. This was even acknowledged publicly in a recent news article. It's not only not poorly backwards compatible, it just basically ISN'T backwards compatible. Want to talk to an IPV4-only resource from your IPV6-only address? You basically have to have some fancy trickery with NAT and DNS in order to do this - it isn't straightforward, and it requires coordination with the IPV4 resource. And the reverse is even worse!

2) Un-necessary complexity in implementation. Partly as a result of #1, implementing IPV6 will be costly, and will require expensive "transition tools" in order to work smoothly. But it's not just because of lack of backwards compatibility - issues such as strange hardware requirements (what... no MAC address?) and the like make the cost of implementing high. Sure, it's not that expensive per device, but multiply that by the entire Internet, and the problem becomes a bit more clear.

3) No net positive for implementing! You don't get "more" for implementing, you get "less". Some stuff that used to work won't, and other stuff that you need to work just isn't there. Sure, Yahoo and Google support IPV6, which is great for the 50 or so people who are on it. But, if anybody cares, it's on IPV4.

4) Tragedy of the Commons: The address shortages don't affect anybody who's already on the 'net. I have an IP address or two already. I don't care if *you* run out, I only care if *I* run out. So, I really don't much care about you so long as I get mine. That's called the "tragedy of the commons" - a common resource is exploited as quickly as possible by people who are motivated to get theirs before anybody else gets it, resulting in a destroyed public resource.

IPV6 sucks. The engineers had their chance, and they blew it. Now it's too late to change it because we don't have another 5 years to committee another solution, and there is already a significant amount of inertia from those poor souls who have already implemented it! (at great cost)

This is NOT going to end well.

Re:Don't say "NAT"

[demonlapin]

You can. I can. Aunt Myrtle can't.

And - let's face it - neither can most of /.'s users. I remember setting up an OpenBSD firewall back in the late 90s, and I did most of my firewall rules configuration by copying someone else's rules. I tweaked them for my specific needs, but there's no way I'd have come up with them on my own. Unless you are a real network admin, you are unlikely to be able to set this up properly.

Re:How many more times are we going to run out?

[Burdell]

RTFS and do the math. 203 million addresses were allocated in 2009; a /8 is 16.7 million addresses; reclaiming a /8 (which would probably take a lot of time and effort, possibly in court) would put off the IPv4 depletion by about one month. It isn't worth the effort; better to put it into IPv6.

Re:No, that's propaganda

[Zocalo]

I know you are joking, but there is a very good reason why Asia is so keen on IPv6 adoption; they are going to feel the crunch first and they know it. IANA has in place an agreement that as soon as one of the RIRs is assigned one of the five final /8s each of the other four RIRs receives one of the remaining /8s and IANA washes their hands of the whole mess. That's without a doubt the most critical milestone along the path to IPv4 exhaustion, so let's look at that instant from the point of each of the RIRs:

• AfriNIC: Incredibly slow burn rate. They're probably still good for another decade or two at this point.
• APNIC: Includes China and India, two of the fastest developing nations on the planet with correspondingly high IPv4 assignment requests. There's no two ways about it; without wholesale IPv6 adoption, they're going to be the ones running out first.
• ARIN: Capitalists to the end, they are on record as saying IPv4 exhaustion is not their problem to solve; it's first come first served and when they are all gone that's it. Even so, there are plenty of US institutions with /8s that could mostly be handed back and reassigned if push came to shove.
• LACNIC: Not quite as low AfriNIC due to developing countries like Brazil, but are still able to sit back and let any problems with IPv6 get resolved before they make the leap.
• RIPE: Have already got the strictest IP assignment policies of the RIRs and will probably just continue to tighten the screw right up until the point of exhaustion; LIR assignment windows are typically about one quarter of what they would have been five years ago. It's a pretty fair bet that APNIC and ARIN will both beat them to the wall.

Pre-emptive strike

[fbjon]

"IPv6 addresses are too long and complicated to type"

...is like saying solar panels are too hard to build when you run out of slave labor in hamster wheels.

"We don't need IPv6 since there is NAT"

...is like saying we don't need new energy solutions because beeswax candles are a tried and trusted technology.

"The Internet will be overrun by zombies when NATs no longer protect us."

...is like saying avoiding antibacterial soap will cause untold misery and disease.

"Just re-allocate some of the wasted space in Class A nets."

...is like saying overcrowding of the planet can be mitigated by decreasing the size of houses.

Re:On Which Planet?

[swillden]

Of course there is - it allows all manner of insecure and misconfigured gear to avoid being probed from the other side of the planet?

That's not an advantage of NAT. That's an advantage of a stateful firewall that disallows inbound connections. NAT is not required to get the same benefit.

All of the machines in my home have public IPv6 addresses, but I have a firewall that blocks inbound connections to all of them. Same security result. No address translation.