Uh-oh! We're almost out of IP addresses!

August 28, 2001 2:40 PM

Uh-oh! We're almost out of IP addresses! The current IP (Internet Protocol) only allows approximately 4.3 billion addresses to be assigned, yet demand in 2006 may be for 7 billion addresses or more? Do we make a tough upgrade to IPv6 or force greedy Class-A users to hand over blocks?
posted by wackybrit (27 comments total)

What about IPv6?
posted by mathowie at 2:52 PM on August 28, 2001

Wait a second, maybe someone should think about IPv6 for a minute here ...

(Sorry.)
posted by sylloge at 2:55 PM on August 28, 2001

did somebody say IPv6?
posted by jcterminal at 2:58 PM on August 28, 2001

A lot of ISPs are going to start requiring their customers' networks to use NAT as much as possible.
posted by kindall at 2:58 PM on August 28, 2001

Corporate customers mind you. NAT is a forbidden word in home DSL clusters. Anyway, unless strongly pressured, I don't see ISP's doing anything to annoy their big corporate clients. It's a money thang.
posted by bloggboy at 3:30 PM on August 28, 2001

wait, what about IPv6?

*ducks*
posted by chrisege at 3:42 PM on August 28, 2001

I really don't see where all these addresses are going to (besides ivy league schools). Say there is 2 billion people in the world. Each person can have 2 IP addresses. Granted you have to factor in a few more things, but basic math shows that this really shouldn't be a big problem.

Another point, what the hell is the media's fascination about wired refrigerators? Every time there is an article about the future or the internet, they always go on about the refrigerator checking up on e-mail. I'm rather sick of it.

Oh and just another thing, this really isn't a new problem, I remember talking about this two years ago, I mean IPv4 wasn't exactly invented with this kind of growth potential in mind. (It's 20 years old in September right?)
posted by geoff. at 3:53 PM on August 28, 2001

what's with all the IPv6's?
posted by dai at 3:54 PM on August 28, 2001

The second thing. Here are a few companies that maybe don't need all of the 16,777,216 IP addresses assigned to each:

Ford Motor Company
Halliburton
Eli Lilly & Co.
Prudential Securities
E.I. DuPont
Mercedes Benz
Merck
posted by nicwolff at 4:01 PM on August 28, 2001

You'll see NAT implemented across firewalled networks long before IPv6 gets implemented. (Right now, the only people using v6 on any kind of scale are academic networks, and that's more as a proof-of-concept.) For example, there's not that much reason for all of the machines around me in the college computer room to have world-look-up-able IP addresses, since they're essentially firewalled workstations, tied to a NT domain and a couple of Linux servers. Give it a few years, and ox.ac.uk will most likely be arm-twisted into giving up some of its hefty block, allocate externally accessible IP addresses to machines that explicitly provide external services, and bung everything else on 192.168.x.x and similar.
posted by holgate at 4:02 PM on August 28, 2001

geoff, I browse the internet through my refrigerator. It has 54 IP addresses.

<seriously folks>Where are the IP adresses
going?</seriously folks>

posted by fuq at 4:04 PM on August 28, 2001

geoff say: Say there is 2 billion people in the world.

I'm not arguing with your actual point but.. why do you say '2 billion' when the world's population is more than three times that? *confused* Potential online population, perhaps..
posted by wackybrit at 4:06 PM on August 28, 2001

holgate: While what you say is the most likely course of action, doesn't this just seem like a way of 'working around' the problem at hand rather than fixing it properly?

When the phone company runs out of numbers it doesn't give each community a single phone and then ask people to share. It opens up a new area code instead.

AFAIK, there are at least 20 'reserved' class A numbers that could be opened up, all which would provide another 16 million IPs each?
posted by wackybrit at 4:09 PM on August 28, 2001

IIRC, phone companies seize the opportunity to add new area codes due to the increased revenue. Apparently, the way that numbers are assigned leads to very inefficient use so that there are never anywhere close to 10⁷ numbers in any given area code.
(I could look this up but instead I'll just spread the rumor and have my idiocy pointed out a few posts later.)
posted by Octaviuz at 4:18 PM on August 28, 2001

While what you say is the most likely course of action, doesn't this just seem like a way of 'working around' the problem at hand rather than fixing it properly?

But "working around" problems is generally the Internet Way.
posted by holgate at 4:55 PM on August 28, 2001

the funny thing about the article linked is that all of the detractors of IPv6 don't actually mention any reasons NOT to support the technology... instead they say stuff like, well we shouldn't hook up our fridges to the net. which is fine, but it has nothing to do with IPv6 -- the point is, eventually, we need to move on.

a similar problem is the 32-bit integer dilemma. for a while now, we've been stuck on 32-bit machines. why is that a problem? well, it's not too bad, but should push come to shove there is a possibility that around 2038 there could be a date meltdown that WILL be what the paranoid thought that Y2K might have been. computer times are currently stored in 32-bit integers, which will overflow sometime in 2038, turning time back to Jan 1, 1970 (which is what time was when the integer clock was initially started, at all zeros).
posted by moz at 5:04 PM on August 28, 2001

ok maybe I was wrong about the world population, 6,157,400,560. I don't know what I was thinking when I said two billion. That's just probably not even the population of Asia. The population of the internet (in the us/canada) is about 100 million. I compensated for 2 years...
posted by geoff. at 5:41 PM on August 28, 2001

The IPv6 proponents have been making this same Chicken Little argument since at least 1997.

We just recently changed ISPs at work, and the new one was downright parsimonious with IP addresses -- we had to justify why we needed 64 of them because they only wanted to give us 32.

Back in 1996 when my last company first went on the Net, we were able to get an entire Class C even though there were only 30 people in the office...that's where a lot of Class C space went in the firt boom years. You can't do that any more.

NAT through the firewall in a corporate environment helps enormously. All 100 or so PCs in my office have their own unqiue IP inside the firewall, but all look the same to the Internet. This could forestall IPv6 for a long time.
posted by briank at 6:33 PM on August 28, 2001

Octaviuz.. great quote!

(I could look this up but instead I'll just spread the rumor and have my idiocy pointed out a few posts later.)

I think this should be suffixed to every post on Metafilter.
posted by wackybrit at 7:15 PM on August 28, 2001

There will always be more IP addresses. Sure, maybe a blink for a while, but it will catch up - in the short term. I suppose we should wonder how long that blink goes on for and who has control of those new addresses.

I am waiting for the debate about household appliances garnering a signifigant portion of addresses. Yeah, wait till BB hits the real domestic market, not just the computer world as we know it now..

Talk about addressing........
posted by tp3wen at 8:01 PM on August 28, 2001

4.3 billion and/or 7 billion addresses is still pretty staggeriing I must admit though. wow.
posted by tp3wen at 8:03 PM on August 28, 2001

NAT is a forbidden word in home DSL clusters.

Why? My ISP convinced me to go to NAT for my "home DSL cluster" because they started to charge substantial monthly fees for multiple IP numbers, which is what we had been using before. I found a hardware router for about $100 (which will pay for itself, therefore, in four months), and configuration was entirely painless.
posted by Rebis at 8:11 PM on August 28, 2001

Hey, did someone mention IPv6?
posted by tpoh.org at 9:17 PM on August 28, 2001

IPv6.

Sorry. Couldn't help myself.
posted by rathikd at 8:44 AM on August 29, 2001

I agree that you'll see NAT used on firewalled networks long before you'll see IPv6 rolled out.

Working for a Tier 1 ISP, that still leaves me with the problem of crackerjack-box network admins that haven't yet figured out what the letters N, A & T stand for... let alone how it works.
posted by steveb at 9:58 AM on August 29, 2001

Actualy, IPv6 is being used quite a bit in Asian contries, which didn't get much v4 space when it was dolled out to begin with.

IP6 is the future... Deal with it :P
posted by delmoi at 6:28 PM on August 29, 2001

We must keep in mind that the commonly cited number of 4.3 billion available IP addresses is horribly misleading. I won't delve too deeply into the mathematics here, but I will point out that subnetting quickly eliminates available addresses (sometimes by more than 50%).

In the worst case scenario, subnetting a class C network into blocks of 4 (i.e. 255.255.255.252 subnet mask), automatically eliminates 2 addresses in each subnet as well as several entire subnets that are rendered unusable.

Internet routers account for a substantial waste of addresses as they necessarily take up an entire subnet for each of their interfaces.
posted by MindRave at 8:29 PM on August 29, 2001