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"

[sopssa]

No, not really. There's companies with whole fucking /8 that have no real purpose to own them, but they've just always had them:

003/8 General Electric Company 1994-05 LEGACY
004/8 Level 3 Communications, Inc. 1992-12 LEGACY
008/8 Level 3 Communications, Inc. 1992-12 LEGACY (two /8's ?)
009/8 IBM 1992-08 LEGACY
013/8 Xerox Corporation 1991-09 LEGACY
015/8 Hewlett-Packard Company 1994-07 LEGACY
016/8 Digital Equipment Corporation 1994-11 LEGACY
017/8 Apple Computer Inc. 1992-07 LEGACY
019/8 Ford Motor Company 1995-05 LEGACY
034/8 Halliburton Company 1993-03 LEGACY
044/8 Amateur Radio Digital Communications 1992-07 LEGACY
045/8 Interop Show Network 1995-01 LEGACY
047/8 Bell-Northern Research 1991-01 LEGACY
048/8 Prudential Securities Inc. 1995-05 LEGACY
052/8 E.I. duPont de Nemours and Co., Inc. 1991-12 LEGACY
053/8 Cap Debis CCS 1993-10 LEGACY
054/8 Merck and Co., Inc. 1992-03 LEGACY
056/8 US Postal Service 1994-06 LEGACY

Just get rid of the companies that are reserving such huge spaces without having a real reason to do so, other than that they were there to reserve them in start of 90's. Also US and UK army and defence and other ministers have several /8, but why really? Other countries do just fine without too.

Re:Don't say "NAT"

[swillden]

No, not really. There's companies with whole fucking /8 [iana.org] that have no real purpose to own them, but they've just always had them:

The block you listed contain a total of 301,989,888 addresses. At 2009's rate of 203 million addresses per year, returning those blocks would buy us less than 18 months. Big whoop.

Also, some of those companies actually do make significant use of the addresses they have. For example, I happen to know that IBM uses a good chunk of the 9.0.0.0 space.

Re:Don't say "NAT"

[Jonner]

There's no security value to NAT. NAT does provide a stateful firewall that disallows inbound connections, but you can do that just as well without NAT, and with a great deal more flexibility.

Thank you for pointing that out. So many people seem to think NAT is a security tool. I think it's because just about any router capable of NAT also has a stateful firewall (since NAT requires tracking of connections) and many people don't understand the distinction.

Re:Don't say "NAT"

[Yaztromo]

Why have a legal battle? Just let the current holders auction off sub-blocks.

You're assuming that the holders of these /8's have been using some sane way in which to assign the IPs within their blocks such that large, contiguous regions are still readily available that make the unused addresses readily routeable. Which, from my experience, they don't. And as the Internet would become nearly unroutable if millions of /31's and /32's suddenly appeared, the only way you could make this work is by having each and every one of those organizations effectively defragment their address use to make large, routable blocks that could be reassigned (e.g., /24s or /16s) -- and for organizations of the size that we're discussing, the cost of that is going to be way more than they'll be able to charge for those address blocks, and they aren't going to do it, fight or no fight.

You can't take an entity the size of (for example) IBM and have them compress their address use into a /12 to free up 240 new /24's without it being a very significant cost in terms of effort and downtime -- particularly when they have absolutely no incentive to do so. Nobody in their right mind would spend the necessary amount of money to make it worth their time and effort, when they can get millions of addresses in IPv6 for next to nothing.

Yaz.

No, that's propaganda

[Anonymous Coward]

We'll never run out of IPv4 addresses. "Peak-IPv4" is a myth created by those who hate America and want Asia's IPv6 to take over. 4 octets forever!

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.

Let me be the first to say ...

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

4 octets should be enough for everyone.

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.

No real scarcity yet

[bizitch]

I just helped out a friend who lives in a remote rural section outside of Chicago. I tried for years and years to get her lit up on decent broadband service.

Finally, we got a relay from a WiMAX provider --

When I went to connect her broadband with a Cisco router - I discovered that she was assigned a FRIGGIN /27 of public numbers!! (i.e. she now personally burns 32 usefull IPV4's)

I was gonna call their support ... but why bother?

You never know if she's gonna need 30+ public ip numbers right? Just because she lives alone - she may get many friends real soon!

Great... now do I switch?

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in one of the most tech-focused parts of the country (downtown San Francisco) and as far as I can tell there's no way for a normal consumer to order native (i.e. not tunneled) IPv6 here.

When I moved to my current apartment in 2004 I specifically went with Speakeasy because they were talking about rolling out IPv6 to customers. Over 5 years later, those plans are still stalled as far as I can tell. None of the other providers seem to be even making a peep about it. If I'm wrong, someone please correct me - I'd love to switch to an IPv6-capable provider.

I've pretty much concluded that IPv6 just isn't going to happen -- instead providers will just force all of us normal people into shared IP addresses. From a technical perspective this isn't hard to do: just move the software that's currently running in your home NAT router onto the DSLAM and only provide a NATed view. For the ISPs there's no downside to this since not only can they avoid rolling out IPv6, it means they have complete control of your network connection.

I bet in 10 years we still won't have IPv6 in our homes, and the idea of having your own IP address (even a dynamically allocated one) will just be a memory. It's a shame.

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.

Now if IPv6 could get fixed...

[Junta]

There are so many ways IPv6 remains broken and too many of the people with influence can tend to say 'working as designed'.

I know that's controversial, so I'll enumerate my pain points:
-DHCPv6 DUID is a pain to 'pre-provision'. When any operating system or firmware instance dhcpv6 for the first time, it sends out something that you'll never know what it would be ahead of time. In 99% of cases, the DUID is a generated value at 'OS Install time' that is used only for that specific OS, and a reinstall or livecd boot will change it out completely. stateless boot, multi-boot systems and multi-stage booting (i.e. pxe -> os) cannot hold together a coherent identity because DHCPv6 is explicitly designed not to do that. Binding by MAC is considered 'evil', but it has been the strategy used for ages. I wouldn't mind so much if DUID was commonly implemented as a value retrieved from motherboard firmware tables, but no one is stepping up to drive that behavior in a spec visible to all parties.

No PXE/bootp boot. I believe they are trying to reinvent, from scratch the boot design from IPv4, and are nearing completion. I fear the extent to which the baby has been tossed out with the bathwater (i.e. 'root-path' was dropped and no one has pulled it into dhcpv6).

Some standards are missing the capability to operate in IPv6. I.e. IPMI hase some IPv4 specific portions of the standard without IPv6 capable equivalents.