IPv4 Will Not Die In 2010

darthcamaro writes "A couple of years ago, the big shots at IANA (that's the people that handle internet addressing) issued a release stating that the IPv4 address space was likely to be gone by 2010. Here we are in 2010 and guess what, IPv4 with its 4.3 billion addresses will NOT be all used up this year. In fact there could be another two years worth of addresses still left at this point. 'We're at about 10.2 percent (IPv4 address space) remaining globally,' John Curran, president and CEO of ARIN said. 'At our current trend rate we've got about 625 days before we will not have new IPv4 addresses available. We're still handling IPv4 requests from ISPs, hosting companies and large users for IPv4 address space, but that's a very short time period.'"

Comments

Panic Averted - Resume Doing Nothing

[Kenshin]

Another two years? Good, now we can all can put off panicking for another two years and not do anything to resolve this in the meantime.

Re:Panic Averted - Resume Doing Nothing

[Dragonslicer]

Issues that NAT causes? Like shielding n00bs from the wilds of the internet?

NAT is a blessing. It allows people to access the net without being exposed to it.

Someone should write some software that can be put on a router that would offer the same protection without also causing all the problems that come with NAT. It would be like this large barrier that burns up any unauthorized data that tries to get by.

Hopefully a good marketing person can think up a decent name for such a thing.

Re:What about the domain parking, tasting, sniping

[Kufat]

Domain squatters and the like use one IP (and one server) for thousands and thousands of domains. They're parasites but they're not using anything like a significant fraction of the available IP space.

Re:Could last another 10 years...

[EyelessFade]

Nothing new there. The university I work at have a /16 network. Everything has its own ip, even projectors. And by God thats how its supposed to work

The adaptation of IPv6 will free IPv4 addresses

[SlOrbA]

I predict that 2012 we will still have available IPv4 addresses.

This will happen because some IPv4 addresses will be reallocated as client-side doesn't need IPv4 addresses in IPv6 to access IPv4 resources. So IPv6 adaptation it self will slow the need to migrate to IPv6 as singular Internet Protocol.

Re:Not entirely true

[A beautiful mind]

It's also the point at which the market for IP addresses opens, and companies start selling subnets.

No. Repeat after me, there is no market in IPv4 addresses. The current rule is that when a RIR requests a block from IANA that would bring the IANA pool below 5 /8s, then every RIR gets one last /8 from the "final five". Then IANA is done and the RIRs have whatever addresses they have left in their unused pool. For AfrNIC it'll last decades, for APNIC/ARIN it's curtains in about a year.

There is no market in IPv4. There never will be, because reclaiming addresses is too hard and routing can't handle it atm (routing too small blocks). Let's switch to IPv6 already, for fuck's sake, we'll have to do that anyway even if a miracle happens, technical problems get worked out and someone sets up an IPv4 market, about 6 months after.