
A decade's worth of IPv4 addresses - r11t
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/01/dont-publish-the-decade-in-ipv4-addresses.ars
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jacquesm
Just like with any other scarce item we'll see more and more tricks to wring
the last out of what we've got.

The good news is that an IP address that is given out can be reclaimed, so
it's not like oil or some other finite substance in a sense that once used it
stays used for ever.

I'd expect a couple of stop-gap measures before we're finally forced to switch
to something better:

    
    
      - a premium on releasing your DHCP lease while you sleep
    
      - pressure from colocation facilities to reduce the 
        number of IPs assigned to a single host
    
      - consolidation of IP addresses for hosting providers
        behind NAT'ing routers
    
      - more usage of ports vs IP addresses since that 
        effectively allows you to extend the 32 bit field 
        in to a 48 bit field
    
      - a price set on the usage of an IP 
    

Then, only when we're really scraping the bottom we'll switch and it will cost
a fortune compared to what a switch in '96 would have cost.

Typical human behaviour, we're doing it with oil I don't see why IP addresses
would be any different, in fact I think we'll learn a lot about how the energy
situation will develop from monitoring this closely.

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NathanKP
I wish they had a graph showing the growth by year of IPv4 usage and how that
compares to the amount of space available with IPv6.

Edit #1: I found one interesting comparison graph:

[http://www.caida.org/research/topology/as_core_network/pics/...](http://www.caida.org/research/topology/as_core_network/pics/ascore-
ipv4-ipv6.200903_poster_1250x850.png)

Edit #2: Another interesting map which has a "You are here" marker:

<http://icicle.dylex.net/~ipmap/>

And a presentation with a good number of graphs showing demand and growth over
the past 5-10 years.

<http://www.potaroo.net/presentations/2006-06-28-ipv4.pdf>

~~~
wmf
_I wish they had a graph showing the growth by year of IPv4 usage and how that
compares to the amount of space available with IPv6._

It would probably look like a map of the solar system, since IPv6 is
astronomically large compared to IPv4.

BTW, Huston's latest trends and predictions are at <http://ipv4.potaroo.net/>
(not completely down, but incredibly slow).

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bretpiatt
The switch of mobile devices from 2G/3G technology using IPv4 to LTE (aka 4G)
using IPv6 will fix a large amount of this, "As IPv4 increasingly became the
de facto standard for networked digital communication, the cost of embedding
substantial computing power into handheld devices dropped. Mobile phones have
become viable Internet hosts. New specifications of 4G devices require IPv6
addressing."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion#Mobile_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion#Mobile_devices)

IPv4 runs as a subset of IPv6 for those of you not into the IP stuff too deep.
IPv6 devices can talk to IPv4 through border devices similar to NAT today so
we can use "private" RFC1918 addresses.

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devicenull
In a way, isn't this kind of good? We're always going to be running short
until the move to IPv6, and I've heard a number of consumer internet providers
are starting to provide IPv6 addresses upon request.

Running out is going to happen eventually, so it might as well happen sooner,
rather then later.

~~~
wmf
I think a predictable time is better than sooner. If you have IPv6 in your
2012 budget then having to do it earlier might be a problem.

