
97% of Internet now full up - _grrr
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/01/ipv4_countdown/
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brk
These articles are slightly misleading. The blocks have been assigned to
_ISPs_ , not to _Users_. There is a still a modestly large (albeit shrinking)
pool of IPv4 addresses available for end-user use. I still don't anticipate
actual scarcity of IPv4 address space for another few years, though it sucks
if you try to start an ISP in that time, as you likely wouldn't be abel to get
any IPv4 address space allocated to you.

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joeyh
No, they have been assigned to RIRs, not ISPs.

The RIRs have their own pools that they can assign to new ISPs.

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brk
Yes, true, but last time I was involved it was getting pretty difficult for
startup ISP's to get allocations. You pretty much had to get a temporary
allocation from an existing provider until you got large enough to justify
your own directly-allocated netblocks.

Anyway, I wasn't trying to get overly deep with my original post, just point
out that in this case "fully allocated" is far from "no more available
addresses".

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kree10
[http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-
space/ipv4-addr...](http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-
space/ipv4-address-space.xml)

How long before one of the companies sitting on "legacy class A" IP space
sells them off? Are any of them doing this already?

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qntm
Organisations who have been assigned /8s were almost uniformly assigned them
very early in the internet's lifespan. That marks out those organisations as
those with a vested interest in the internet-- that is, science and technology
organisations. In the 15 years that have passed since then, there's an
excellent chance that they'll have expanded to internally allocate or at least
earmark all the IP space available to them.

Freeing up even half of the block would probably require a huge amount of
internal reconfiguration and only buy the IPv4 internet another few weeks at
most.

Of course, if it could turn some profit, that makes it more likely.

~~~
kree10
I'm mainly thinking of companies like Eli Lilly or Ford. How much of their
public /8 space are they really using?

If/when the ipv4 crisis happens, yes, it should be worth their while to redo
their networks to sell off a /8. Even with some of the tech companies with /8s
like HP (who has two, since they own DEC) or Apple, it probably will (but not
yet) make economic sense to sell.

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ams6110
By way of NAT there is effectively unlimited IPv4 space. I predict IPv6 will
continue its very slow pace of adoption for quite some time.

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msbarnett
ISP-level NAT is a nightmare scenario for anything P2P; you can say goodbye to
skype and bittorrent under "effectively unlimited" NAT'd IPv4.

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omh
This is happening already for much of the 3G internet (at least here in the
UK).

Perhaps we'll end up with an internet-routable IPv4 address being a chargable
extra from ISPs. That could be easier for them than rolling out IPv6, at least
in the short term.

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Aaronontheweb
Time for IPv6!

~~~
alanh
There’s no place like ::1!

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mike_esspe
Idea for startup: create a market for reselling IP addresses? IPv4 Exchange :)

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astrange
IP addresses are owned by IANA, not the user. They can't be sold.

~~~
brk
Not to mention it's not easy to just randomly route specific IP addresses to
specific locations. The IPs generally have to be part of a larger netblock,
and associated with an ASN to enable border routers to figure out where to
send stuff without requiring them to need 1TB of memory for routing tables...

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pjy04
The new Y2K scare

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makeramen
anyone know what the exact number of remaining IPs are in that 3%?

