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

[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.

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:IPv6 has this tiny problem

[Sique]

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

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.

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: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