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We're Running Iut of IPv4 Addresses. Time For IPv6. Really

arstechnica.com — A little over a year ago, I wrote an article about the IPv4 address consumption with the subtitle IPv4 Address Space: 2.46 Billion Down, 1.25 Billion to Go. A week ago, we reached the magic number of 2.7 billion IPv4 addresses used. With 3.7 billion possible addresses,ยน this means we now have less than a billion unused IPv4 addresses left.

Who dugg this? Made popular Aug 18, 2008

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  • hove, on 08/18/2008, -8/+240*****, i hate it when i run Iut of things!!!
  • Shogi, on 08/18/2008, -3/+184Let me guess, we run out on December 21, 2012?
  • pbryan, on 08/17/2008, -2/+113Save the IPs!
  • swordedge, on 08/18/2008, -9/+118one, the US alone has 2 billion of those 4 billion addresses. We are hogs! We also don't feel the pinch
    two, Due to one, the rest of the world will DRAG the US kicking and screaming to IPv6.
    three, politicians will complain that it cose billions to converts even though most commercial routers already handle IPv6 just fine thank you
    four IPv6 has advantages other than address space. No, I can't name them at this time.
    five I keep waiting for Cell Phone companies to roll out IPv6. Due to the address space, they don't have to poll phones every two minutes so their battery life doubles if they use IPv6 rather than IPv4.
    six IPv6 has
    340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456
    Addresses. In English that is

    Three Hundred Forty Undecillion Two Hundred Eighty Two Decillion Three Hundred Sixty Six Nonillion Nine Hundred Twenty Octillion Nine Hundred Thirty Eight Septillion Four Hundred Sixty Three Sextillion Four Hundred Sixty Three Quintillion Three Hundred Seventy Four Quadrillion Six Hundred Seven Trillion Four Hundred Thirty One Billion Seven Hundred Sixty Eight Million Two Hundred Eleven Thousand Four Hundred Fifty Six


    Or about 1500 per sq ft of earths surface

  • WestonP, on 08/18/2008, -2/+86I've been hearing this IPv4 doomsday talk for over 10 years now. It's kind of hard to take it seriously. We still have a billion addresses left, and most of the ones we have today are for things that don't really need their own IP and would still work fine if they were NAT'ed.
  • duggdowncatisad, on 08/18/2008, -4/+72Nobody will ever need more than 4,294,967,296 IP addresses.
  • smartmlp, on 08/18/2008, -0/+60The only thing I dont like about IPv6 is that I can no longer memorize them like I do with IPv4 (since IPv4 is a lot like memorizing a phone number). I guess some of the ones with a lot of 0's in them can still be, but considering they are 128 bits long, that is painful.
  • dvsbastard, on 08/18/2008, -0/+59What the hell are you talking ablut?!
  • erojei, on 08/18/2008, -4/+58MIT alone uses 1 A-Class, 4 B-Class ranges etc... Reclaim some of the stupidly and insanely allocated IP ranges and it will take many more years before we need to spend $$ rolling out IP v6.

    MIT ranges : (http://libstaff.mit.edu/colserv/digital/ordering/i ...
    18.*.*.*
    128.30.*.*
    128.31.*.*
    128.52.*.*
    129.55.*.*
    192.52.61.*-192.52.66.*
    198.125.160.*-198.125.163.*
    198.125.176.*-198.125.192.*

    Why not start by going through every single corporation on this list
    http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space ...
  • inactive, on 08/18/2008, -0/+53I can't understand ylur accent.
  • john2kx, on 08/18/2008, -0/+44Yeah, 256 bytes ought to be enough for anybody.
  • cloudberries, on 08/18/2008, -2/+41That's a big number
    /states the obvious

    We should just skip to IPv8 for an extra few undecillions of them though, just to be on the safe side
  • xaxxon, on 08/18/2008, -5/+43WTF ALLOT?!?

    alot isn't bad enough for you? You have to capitalize it AND add an extra 'l'?

    The funny part is that you misspelled it SO badly that you actually spelled a different word that is actually relevant to the conversation - how to allot the IP addresses. But damn, dude.
  • liquisoft, on 08/18/2008, -6/+43Get the ***** lut!
  • dibbkd, on 08/18/2008, -1/+35IPv2 killed the dinosaurs.
  • erig, on 08/18/2008, -0/+34You sure it's only 1,500 per square feet of earth's surface?

    Earth's Surface (according to various websites): 196,940,400 square miles
    196,940,400 * (5,280^2) = 5,490,383,247,360,000 square feet

    Number of IPv6 IPs: 2^128 = 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456

    340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 / 5,490,383,247,360,000 = 61,977,889,628,116,596,793,421, or "sixty-one sextillion, nine hundred and seventy-seven quintillion, eight hundred and eighty-nine quadrillion, six hundred and twenty-eight trillion, one hundred and sixteen billion, five hundred and ninety-six million, seven hundred and ninety-three thousand, four hundred and twenty-one" per square foot of Earth's surface.
  • daxz, on 08/18/2008, -20/+50Two of my friends died while trying to memorize their IPv6 addresses..
  • inactive, on 08/18/2008, -0/+28They own a whole class A? 18.*.*.*? That's so mean!
  • solistus, on 08/18/2008, -1/+28There's no place like ::1.
  • bobbknight, on 08/18/2008, -2/+28OMG it's Y2K all over again.
  • HotSaucePanCake, on 08/18/2008, -5/+31Lld news
  • Calcheesmo, on 08/18/2008, -0/+25Save them..we're running Lut!
  • Hellman109, on 08/17/2008, -11/+36Mobiles in developing countries will suck ALLOT of IPs too. Unlike corporate networks that can have 1,000's of PCs per external IP, mobile phones are generally 1:1 with GPRS/3G/etc. connections. And mobiles are getting those countries connected more then PCs will in the short to medium term.

    But then again, I bought a top of the line Netgear router 2 weeks ago, it doesnt support IPv6, thats where the killer is, OS' and such support it, but the interconnects do not.
  • UtahApocalyse, on 08/18/2008, -0/+25so islamic terrorists are after our IPv4 domains??
  • werries, on 08/18/2008, -0/+25IPv6 is why the Mayans disappeared.
  • novenator, on 08/18/2008, -0/+25The tendency of human nature, nothing changes until its too late. Get ready for the crunch
  • infiniphunk, on 08/18/2008, -4/+28It's when the Mayan calendar runs lut.
  • BossKey, on 08/18/2008, -2/+25Ohhh, is THIS what the Mayan calendar means by ending on about that date?
  • b0rg, on 08/18/2008, -5/+27Absurd. If we had used up IP space the way we did in 1989, we'd have burned through the entire space in the first six months of this year. But we didn't.

    My house may be atypical, but I've got (rough count) 29 internet-enabled devices. I have one public IP, and to be honest I could share that one with my entire block. Hell, my employer has 4,500 people lurking behind a handful of IP's.

    IPv6 is likely to pop up in small pools here and there, but it is an addition to the existing IPv4 infrastructure, and will never be a replacement for it, except by attrition.

    Now if you want to panic about something, let's talk about AS numbers...
  • ilovelegos, on 08/18/2008, -3/+24What is a Running lut? Best definition wins!!
  • DeathJux, on 08/18/2008, -1/+22Just for an idea of perspective, everyone on Earth could have an IPv6 address for each hair on his/her body and we'd still have plenty left over.
  • stretch611, on 08/18/2008, -1/+22For #3 you mention politicians. I would be surprised if even 5% of our politician understand anything about IPV6. Ted Stevens thinks that it is some kind of new "SuperTube." :D
  • talonh, on 08/18/2008, -4/+24Top of the line... Netgear. lmao. Never thought I'd see those words together.
  • inactive, on 08/18/2008, -2/+22Whoa... I don't know that. My GPRS and 3G phone connections use private IPs assigned by the ISP's server. I am checking my GPRS internet connection right now, and the Client IPv4 Address is 192.168.20.227. The last time I checked my 3G connection, the IP was in 10.*.*.* class. So these are all only private IPs. Remember, private IPs are freely used and shared by anyone anywhere. The chance is most computers in the world are assigned with 127.0.0.1 or 192.168.0.1 by default.

    Where do you get that 1:1 usage statement from?
  • Zantive, on 08/18/2008, -8/+25I see what you did there.
  • pnrl, on 08/18/2008, -1/+18We will never literally run out of IPv4 as in "Sorry, none are left. You're off-line!", but the shortage forces careful allocation, recycling of addresses and makes cost of allocated IP higher.

    That's why you have dynamic IPs for broadband and you have to pay extra for static IP.

    That's why you have hosting with host-based, not ip-based virtual hosts, and SSL is nearly impossible on shared hosting.
  • trickyt, on 08/18/2008, -0/+17He means to say switch to IPv6 and don't look back. Or you'll turn into a statue of salt.
  • subliminalurge, on 08/18/2008, -0/+17It's about time that started to happen.
  • stuffradio, on 08/18/2008, -0/+16Idiots.
  • denebgarza, on 08/18/2008, -0/+16Don't worry guys! People who we will never hear about will solve this problem, we just have to sit back, relax, and watch some porn.
  • lambda, on 08/18/2008, -0/+15I llld.
  • Kral, on 08/18/2008, -2/+17There is definitely a reason for every device to have an external IP. NAT broke a HUGE portion of the internet. Do you know the reason why we can't deploy new IP protocols like SCTP and DCCP today is because of NAT? NAT chained us to a handful of ancient IP protocols because in order to deploy a new one, you must first replace all NAT devices, as they have to be written to understand the protocol in order to be able to NAT it. That was /not/ how the internet was designed. It was a violation of end to end, and sure enough, the exact scenario that had been warned about happened: innovation ground to a standstill. Rather than being able to deploy new protocols the day they were invented, you can now measure the time it takes in decades since those NAT devices are in the homes of end-users and might not be replaced until they eventually break. SCTP's going on 9 years now and is still almost completely unusable across consumer internet. Even major wireless ISPs like those selling EVDO service wind up blocking new protocols because they had to build their wireless infrastructure on NAT, and home DSL routers that use NAT as sold by AT&T do as well. The only thing that can be done at the moment is to wrap it in UDP and give up on anything other than ECN that required network mediation.

    I'm not even going to bother going into all the other things that mangling the internet to try and delay the conversion to IPv6 ruined (e.g., we could have had real publish/subscribe rather than polling RSS, and we could have had global multicast rather than extremely low resolution video we're beholden to youtube for) as I figure I'm just wasting my time explaining this as most people here just want to look at lolcats. But yeah, the people that create your internet are rather pissed off at this whole situation, and if you're wondering why there's been no new major IP protocol other than TCP for so long, now you know. It will probably stay that way until IPv6 is widely deployed which does away with NAT, and with the current political climate for technology, I might be dead before then.
  • pbryan, on 08/18/2008, -1/+16http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lut
  • andypop481, on 08/18/2008, -1/+14thats over 9000!
  • b0rg, on 08/18/2008, -0/+13just remember that only a few bytes are actually in use, and :: is your friend :)
  • Dested, on 08/18/2008, -0/+12This article wasnt to interesting to me until I happened to open up peergaurdian and noticed that it was currently blocking 1,015,941,449 ip addresses. I dont want 37% of the possible registered ip addresses knowing that im downloading the simpsons season 4.

    I mean ubuntu.
  • cloudberries, on 08/18/2008, -0/+12Sweet, that's my birthday. I knew I was an omen of at least one type of impending doom. Hurrah!
  • Zippo, on 08/18/2008, -0/+12Most OS' used today support IPv6.... XP, Vista, Mac, Linux, etc... they all support it.
    It's just a matter of the ISPs actually rolling it out... and people getting used to it.
  • popltree2, on 08/18/2008, -1/+12GTFO
  • cloudberries, on 08/18/2008, -0/+11"Six times as many tubes, in almost exactly the same space, but with fewer trucks"
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