Whatever Happened To the IPv4 Address Crisis?

alphadogg writes "In February 2011, the global Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated the last blocks of IPv4 address space to the five regional Internet registries. At the time, experts warned that within months all available IPv4 addresses in the world would be distributed to ISPs. Soon after that, unless everyone upgraded to IPv6, the world would be facing a crisis that would hamper Internet connectivity for everyone. That crisis would be exacerbated by the skyrocketing demand for IP addresses due to a variety of factors: the Internet of Things (refrigerators needing their own IP address); wearables (watches and glasses demanding connectivity); BYOD (the explosion of mobile devices allowed to connect to the corporate network); and the increase in smartphone use in developing countries. So, here we are three years later and the American Registry for Internet Numbers is still doling out IPv4 addresses in the United States and Canada. Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?"

Comments

NAT

[hcs_$reboot]

While phones use Internet connectivity, they usually connect through the carrier infrastructure which may only allocate a few (or even 1) IPv4 addresses, thanks to NAT.

Re:NAT

[Rich0]

Yup. NAT isn't really too troublesome on phones since they rarely run servers, are usually connecting to cloud-based services, and they move around so much that they'd probably have an IP change every 10 minutes if you handled them like a traditional routable IP.

If I were using cellular service as my actual home ISP it would drive me nuts, though.

IPv6 is needed more than it ever was. We just haven't reached the end of v4 yet.

Re:NAT

[aurizon]

We need to get the ground work done so that IPv8 can be introduced smoothly - the galaxy demands to be properly served...

Re:NAT

[Bert64]

This is far more troublesome for people who *do* run servers...
If you are getting abusive users from a mobile ISP, how do you ban those users?
Block the IP and you block every customer of that isp.

Re:NAT

[jkrise]

There are 2 dimensions to the IPv4 problem - the user end; and the server end. Except for newly formed companies looking to provide internet access to their users through a proxy server; the individual users are largely oblivious to the crisis; as you rightly mentioned.

But try hosting your own server (non-cloud provider) - your ISP forces you to acquire IPv6; and you have to jump through hoops to make it smoothly accessible over VPNs and the general inernet.

Re:NAT

[mjr167]

Practically speaking, the IP address doesn't change unless you reboot the modem or manually do a release/renew.

Re:NAT

[kasperd]

NAT isn't really too troublesome on phones since they rarely run servers, are usually connecting to cloud-based services

Any sort of peer-to-peer communication is problematic, if NAT is involved. Lots of the communication you want to do on phones is peer-to-peer in its nature, but actually implementations have often chosen inferior cloud based implementations, simply to work around NAT. Why else would you involve a cloud service, when what you really want to do is to move some data from one phone to another?

Additionally, even communication with cloud based services is problematic when NAT is involved.

Connecting to a cloud service in order to get a notification, once there is a new email or a new chat message is something you often want to do on a phone. But you cannot do that through a NAT, unless you a prepared to send a constant stream of packets to keep a connection tracking entry alive. Now your phone has to wake up every so often just to send another keepalive packet through the NAT. This consumes battery power, it also consumes bandwidth and if everybody does it, it consumes entries on the NAT.

If the NAT does run out of entries for connections, it will have to lower the lifetime of connections. That will lead to applications sending keepalives more frequently, and we are back in the same situation as before, only wasting more battery power and bandwidth.

and they move around so much that they'd probably have an IP change every 10 minutes if you handled them like a traditional routable IP.

NAT does not solve that problem, it actually makes it worse. You still have to keep track of the local IP you assigned to the phone if it is behind a NAT. The tracking of the IP address is not any harder just because it is a public address. But by introducing a CGN you introduce the requirement that all the traffic from the phone gets routed through that CGN even as the phone is moving. If you did not have the NAT layer, you only have the challenge of routing packets to the phone as it is moving, there is no need to get it through one particular NAT as well.

Re:NAT

[SuricouRaven]

Most ISPs assign staticish addresses. They are technically dynamic, but change very infrequently - in my case, no more than once or twice a year, baring a change of modem or network card.

Re:NAT

[peragrin]

depending on the provider you don't get a new ip address when do those things either. from my limited experiments with Comcast and Time Warner they give the same IP address to the same Mac address every time.

I replaced a router on both and got new ip addresses. however when i cloned the mac address from the old routers to the new I got the old ip addresses.

Now this is really limited. 4 routers on two service providers. so take it with a grain of salt and a shot of tequila .

Re:NAT

[SQLGuru]

Until each electron, proton, and neutron needs an address......and each quark....etc.

Probably the home router...

[neilo_1701D]

When that particular comment was made, the ubiquity of the home router dolling out DHCP addresses probably wasn't considered. Nowadays, you only need one IP address for your home and let the router sort it out.

There's still a problem, but people seem to prefer to adapt and come up with (very) clever workarounds rather than get some new solution shoved down their throat that renders existing equipment obsolete for no good reason.

Re:Probably the home router...

[sribe]

Good luck with web apps that use IP based sessions.

Are you kidding me??? That stopped being even remote practical about 20 years ago.

Re:Probably the home router...

[Chris Mattern]

Are you/the article saying that it is possible to have a single connection to your ISP, but for every computer, fridge, toaster, TV, etc. to have its own global IP address?

Yes, that is exactly how IPv6 is supposed to work.

Your ISP can give you a block of dynamic/static IP addresses, which your router assigns instead of 192.168.1.X?

Possibly, but not necessarily even that. You could be set up to simply automatically generate IPv6 addresses from your MACs, and the ISP doesn't even explicitly grant you an address block.

Re:Probably the home router...

[Antique Geekmeister]

As it stands, your carier does NAT themselves and gives your router one IP address, typically in the 10.0.0.0/8 address space. Your home router then does another layouer of NAT, and gives internal devices their own IP address range in the 1902.168.1.0/16 address space. The advantagie is that one can support a _tremendous_ backend infrastructure without public IP addresses. This is also a tremendous security advantage: it reduces the exposed attack surface for script kiddies and casual network scanners to attack your home devices, they have to successfully gain control of the router or another device inside your network to pass along their attack.

The disadvantage, which dismays some people, is that NAT channels _publication_ of services through those NAT enabled routers or through externally hosted web space. It effectively makes the allocation of IP addresses and ports for exposed services require more thought, and allows easier throttling or monitoring of traffic at those NAT routers. I've found it to be a tremendous security and network management improvement: it makes firewall and routing design _much_ more stable and helps prevent people from running dangerous, unauthorized services from office networks, such as running public NFS servers without telling anyone aware of the security implications.

Re:Probably the home router...

[smash]

This is exactly how IP (irrespective of version) is supposed to work... NAT is an ugly hack that breaks shit.

Re:Probably the home router...

[kasperd]

Which means everything still breaks just as if NAT was present.

That is not correct. A properly configured firewall does not cause nearly the same level of breakage as a NAT does.

And finally, the biggest hurdle for IPv6 is NAT.

That is true. NAT is hurting IPv6 deployment in many ways. Had NAT never been invented, we could all have been running IPv6 years ago, and the transition would have gone smoother. For example a large part of the difficulties in using IPv6 through tunnels is entirely due to the IPv4 connections being infested with NATs.

With IPv6, you lose this handy feature - your ISP decides to change your prefix?

With IPv6 there are enough addresses, that this should happen very rarely.

Well, damn, they haven't done that in 5 years and now everything has been hardcoded with the old prefix in it - all your internal services used it.

Then use DNS and/or RFC 4193.

CGN, perhaps?

[Zocalo]

Just a guess, but maybe widespread adoption of Carrier Grade NAT might have given IPv4 a bit of a longer shelf life. It's either that or the kind of fun and games that I once read that Hutchison (Orange) was doing on their mobile network, with no less than seven separate instances of the 10/8 network being juggled around at once.

Still, even ARIN is now starting to tighten the screws on the size of netblocks they are assigning out, so I suspect providers are being a lot more careful about how they subnet and assign out IP addresses than they used to be. I suspect that just moving stuff like DB servers and other backend infrastructure onto private IP space instead of just dumping them in the DMZ for convenience has helped a bit too, not too mention being a better security practice.

Only if you can't get addresses

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only a crisis if it affects you. (sic)

That's basically what is happening, a giant stand off between the access networks and the hosting providers looking who will blink first.

From then end user perspective, you should see what happens to Skype and games when both end-users are behind a double NAT, it's hilarious. But most people seem to cope just fine.

For the hosting providers then fun really starts when you can't get a public IPv4 for your new webserver, that'll be fun. There's no NAT workaround for that, some european hosting providers are already feeling the crunch in their IPv4 blocks, you can only host so many servers. So what can you do? Jack up the prices ofcourse, isn't the free market wonderful!

If you are a business in the EMEA and you still want or need your own PI space for BGP, tough cookies, you can't get it anymore.

Re:Only if you can't get addresses

[C3ntaur]

For the hosting providers then fun really starts when you can't get a public IPv4 for your new webserver, that'll be fun. There's no NAT workaround for that, some european hosting providers are already feeling the crunch in their IPv4 blocks, you can only host so many servers. So what can you do? Jack up the prices ofcourse, isn't the free market wonderful!

This. This is why IPv4 will stick around for decades to come. There is too much profit potential in it, and IPv6 costs too much money to implement.

I'm waiting for

[rossdee]

IPv8.1

Re:10 years

[wonkey_monkey]

Even through all addresses have been given out

They haven't:

the American Registry for Internet Numbers is still doling out IPv4 addresses

ARIN currently has “approximately 24 million IPv4 addresses in the available pool for the region,” according to President and CEO John Curran.

Bad summary

[AdamHaun]

Unsurprisingly, address exhaustion still going on. APNIC and RIPE are down to their last /8 and are now handing out addresses as slowly as they can. ARIN and LACNIC will reach their last /8 this year. AFRINIC won't run out for years, so I suspect their new infrastructure will be built on IPv6. Here's the relevant data.

There's a finite number of addresses, guys. They're not going to magically stop running out.

ISPs taking IPs back from customers

[kasperd]

Less than two months after RIPE introduced rationing of IPv4 addresses, I one day found my internet connectivity to be totally broken. Turns out the ISP had turned on NAT in my modem (without telling me about it beforehand). They did have a self service page where I could turn NAT off again and get functional internet connectivity again. However some of my devices no longer received any reply from the DHCP server.

I called their support, who said the lack of reply from their DHCP server was due to the network interface on my computer being defective (which was obviously a lie). When I pointed out that their conclusion was directly contradicting the symptoms I had already explained them about, they just hanged up.

Calling their support one more time, I was able to get to a supporter who knew what was going on, and didn't just invent a lie. It turns out they had run out of IPv4 addresses, and were now enforcing a maximum of two devices online per customer regardless of what limit had been in effect previously.

A few days later I called them again asking for native IPv6, which I considered only fair, given that they had taken away some of the IPv4 addresses, which I were using. They promised me native IPv6 before the end of the year. That was in 2012, they still haven't delivered.

Other ISPs are putting all new customers behind CGN unless they pay an extra fee for a static IP address. You'd think they'd give you native IPv6 along with that. But alas, according to the majority of ISPs, there is no shortage of IPv4 addresses in this country, so nobody needs IPv6. And since nobody is buying IPv6 connectivity, the ISPs will not offer it (completely ignoring the fact, that the reason nobody is buying IPv6 connectivity is that the ISPs themselves aren't offering it in the first place).

From what I am told, native IPv6 plus CGN for IPv4 is already fairly common in Germany, but that's not enough to make me want to move across the border. I have yet to hear about ISPs putting customers who previously had a public IPv4 address behind NAT, but I would not be surprised if it happened.

Re:IPv6 has this tiny problem

[Sique]

That was the point of having DNS in the first place. Four octets just weren't bad enough.

Re:IPv6 has this tiny problem

[infogulch]

Fixed:

"Hey Joe, what's your IP address?"
"I don't have one, I'm behind a NAT and firewall that I don't control."

Of the two problems, I find yours the lesser of two evils.

The US has nothing to worry about but...

[trparky]

The United States has enough IP addresses in our pool to carry us through to the end of say... 2018. If current growth of the Internet continues we will still have enough IP addresses in our pool, we'll just have to knock a year or two off that projection. Say, may 2017 or half way through 2016. The United States has more than enough IP addresses to keep us going for some time.

Europe and other parts of the world is a totally different story. When the Internet was created and we started handing out the IP addresses we were quite stingy when giving them to other parts of the world. The United States is one of the biggest hoarders of IP addresses in the IPv4 world while Europe and the rest of the world got relatively few IP addresses with compared to how many the US holds. There's where we are seeing the problem.

Europe has the issue, Europe has no choice in the matter; they have to move to IPv6 or their side of the Internet is pretty much crippled. So unless we all implement 6to4 to allow United States Internet users to connect to European web site (that's fugly) or finally get on the bandwagon in converting to IPv6 in the US, there will eventually be two Internets; a US and a European Internet with IPv4 and IPv6 being the limiting factor.

Re:The real crisis is the routing table size probl

[Typical Slashdotter]

IPv6 is designed with such a large address space specifically to make BGP tables smaller. One of the factors causing IPv4 tables to grow is that, since addresses are scarce, people are getting clever with how they allocate blocks, divvying things up very finely so as not to waste. Since BGP entries are by block, this creates many blocks that need routing. The IPv6 designers went with 128 bits of address not because they think they need room for 2^128 hosts, but because there will be enough room to divide blocks hierarchically and logically, "wasting" addresses all along the way. This will allow global routing tables to more accurately reflect the structure there is between ISPs, shrinking their size.

It's there, just wait and see

[Morgor]

In short, it's just too early to tell. Just because the RIRs ran out of addresses, it doesn't mean that the LIRs have yet (the ISPs).

Based on my experience as a network engineer at an ISP, the following is happening already:

Small ISPs and ISPs that have not been in the business for a long time* have either run out or are on the verge of doing so. They are doing the following:

  * Purchasing legacy IPv4 addresses from enterprises with /16 networks from the old days where available.
  * Deploying CGN-like solutions for their end-customers if their end-customers are residential users.

Larger ISPs and older ISPs with allocations from ye old pre-RIR days continue to hold addresses and are often able to free large quantities of addresses from old deployments. Mind you, a lot of public IPv4 space have been "wasted" on infrastructure addressing, and management of devices that were not even connected to the internet. Devices such as modems, DSLAMs, CPEs and similar.

One could easily speculate that the business of ISPs will be severely affected in the future, as customers will go to the old providers that have plenty of v4-space available at the cost of newer players who followed the RIR regulations of only applying for the address space they needed based on relative short-term predictions.

If you are a registered LIR you will see a flood of SPAM from so-called IP brokers who are trying to purchase unused IPv4 space in hope of selling this to LIRs in need. That market will probably become quite desperate in the coming years.

Oh, and by the way, I see no evidence that IPv6 deployment is taking any noticeable speed.

*) Long as in they were in the game when classfull allocations were made.

Re:Chicken little

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't get new IPv4 addresses in Europe or Asia. End users are already on DS-lite, with IPv6 for their only public address. You can not initiate a connection to millions of Europeans and Asians if you don't use IPv6. Not soon, now.

Re:Chicken little

[Alain Williams]

It was never a crisis to begin with? This is why you don't listen to chicken littles.

I don't know where you live, but at a guess I would put you in a country such as the USA or in United Kingdom. If you look at how many IP addresses there are per 1,000 population you will see that the USA has about 5,000, the UK 2,000 but that India has 29. So it might not be a problem for you, but for for some it is. It is not just 1st vs 3rd world, overall the EU has 19 per 1,000.

Many people use more than one IP address (think: office, home, mobile 'phone). Yes NAT can help, but it is not the complete answer.

Re:What happened?

[Dagger2]

Thankfully they keep discovering new fields of IPv4 addresses. Peak IP is never going to happen!

Re:What happened?

[Zero__Kelvin]

". It was the same for Y2k,"

I'm glad you brought this up, as it is an excellent parallel. The Y2K crisis was real just as the IPv4 shortage was real. In both cases people took pro-active steps to head off disaster. Now, because those proactive steps averted the disaster all those who had no hand in it and didn't understand it proclaim: See! It was never an issue! It didn't happen!. No shit sherlock; it didn't happen because people saw the potential for disaster and took steps to avoid it.

For anybody paying attention...

[Yaztromo]

For anybody paying any attention over the past few years, this shouldn't come as a surprise.

The IANA ran out of IPv4 address space available for doling out to the Regional Internet Registries (of which there are six) three years ago. APNIC (Asia Pacific) and RIPE NCC (Europe) went below a single /8 three and two years ago respectively. The IPv4 address exhaustion has already begun.

ARIN (North America), however, has 82 /8s. If you consider that there are only 221 /8s in total (the IANA keeps 35 for reserved use), this means that ARIN has 37% of all usable Internet addresses assigned to it, for roughly 8% of the worlds population. More than a third of all possible addresses for less than a tenth of the worlds population.

Even still, ARIN now only has about 1.3 /8s free. Projections have them running out next year. They've always been estimated to be one of the last RIRs to run out (with AfriNIC being last, as they still have just over 3 of their nearly 13 /8s free) due in part to the huge number of /8s already in use in North America (way out of proportion to the population of the continent).

I feel really ashamed every time this topic comes up on /. at the complete and rampant ignorance of the issues surrounding IPv4 and IPv6. We will run out of IPv4 address space, but address space is hardly the only problem with IPv4. The bigger problem is ROUTABILITY -- the IPv4 routing tables have become seriously unweildly, they are getting progressively worse (in part due to InterRIR transfers of address blocks now that Europe and Asia have run out of addresses), and they continue to need more and more compute power thrown at the problem just to keep up. The number of BGP forwarding entries has doubled from roughly 250k to nearly 500k in just the last six years. The algorithms used for determining routes in IPv4 are complex. The computability is difficult, and it's slowing down the Internet today.

IPv6 solves a lot of the routing problems inherent in IPv4, making routability a lot easier to compute. IPv6 packets have a simpler header, routers don't need to provide fragmentation services, and there is no header checksum. IPv6 also avoids the routing anomalies present in IPv4 due to things such as the switch to CIDR. We know a heck of a lot more about packet routing now than we did in the 60s when IPv4 was first defined, and these improvements are available in IPv6.

This is why I cringe whenever I see a post in an IPv6 address exhaustion related /. story complaining about a lack of backwards compatibility in IPv6, or anytime anyone says that NAT is good enough for everybody. As the address space fragments even further, and historic /8s and /16s are broken up into ever smaller units which are then distributed to diverse geographies, the routing table in IPv4 is going to continue to blow up, becoming ever uglier -- it simply wasn't designed to scale in the manner in which we're using it. IPv6 brings sanity to global routing again, in a way that no backward-compatible solution could achieve.

The IANA is out of addresses. RIPE and APNIC are virtually out of addresses (with only enough reserved to aid in IPv4 - IPv6 tunnelling and translation services). ARIN is down to less than 1.5 /8s, and survives purely on the fact that it has a disproportionate number of /8s compared to the population it serves. And worst of all, IPv4 routing is an absolute mess that requires a ton of processing power and compute time to maintain. Remember these things before you post something silly about being pro-NAT, pro-some-untested-IPv4-address-extension-proposal, complaining about backward compatibility, or how people have been predicting IPv4 exhaustion for the last 25 years (just because you see the train coming towards you way off in the distance does

Re:Chicken little

[RR]

Another part of the answer...take back the class A allotments that were given to companies/organizations early on.

Why does this myth persist? Modded Interesting, even. This proves that education is the major barrier to IPv6 adoption.

We can't "take back" the class A allotments because there is no "back" to take it to. Those were given by Jon Postel before IANA existed, and IANA does not claim any more legal authority to those addresses than anybody else. It's an unwise investment of limited resources to challenge those companies' legal departments.

Also, with the rate that IPv4 addresses were being allocated, and the acceleration of the rate before 2011, those addresses would have postponed IPv4 exhaustion by months at best. It's surely not worth the expense to force all those companies to release their class A networks just so we could collectively fail to do our jobs, that is, switch to IPv6.

Re:Chicken little

[slimjim8094]

Google agrees. They're probably a bit less US-centric.

As bad as the ISPs in the US are, we're actually a world leader in v6 traffic. Comcast, Time Warner (the ones I have personal experience with) and apparently Verizon are all doing v6 natively and properly. That accounts for a huge percentage of customers - as they get around to replacing their gateways, it should "just work".

-- reply ends, general comments begin --

Just so everybody's clear what I mean by "just work" - when I moved into my new apartment, I rented a modem/router from the cableco (I of course bought my own a few weeks later like a good nerd). Out of the box, it requested a /64 prefix and delegated it to the internal network, including the v6 DNS servers. All OSes made in the last 10 years know how to do v6 properly, so everything from my desktop to my phone to my smart TV can access v6 resources just fine.

v6 is here. It works great, and you get real IPs! Like, you can actually paste an IP to a friend so he can download a file from your box just like the old days, without doing any NAT port mapping bullshit. Want to play a game, or video chat, or VNC or something? Just open a damn socket, no STUN or UPnP or any other crap.

I don't get why so many Slashdotters are bitching/FUDding about v6. There's no money in it - all the ISPs are doing it happily - so it's not astroturfing. And the comments don't fit the typical troll model. What gives?