That’s it – the Asia Pacific region is the first to run out of IPv4 addresses.
This happened following an assignment of around half a million addresses to support the users at the Chinanet Fujian Province Network.
The pool of available addresses to the region including some of the world’s largest populations, such as China, India, Indonesia, and some of the world’s largest economies, such as Japan and Australia, has depleted to such low levels, that the registry responsible for distribution of these addresses will now ration them, such that any ISP requesting space will be given a single block of 1,024 addresses, on a single occasion only.
This is enough space to allow the ISP only to host NAT or ipv4 to ipv6 translation technologies. It is not enough to address a large content infrastructure, hosting environment, or internet access customer-base.
The rules of the game have today changed for 50% of the world’s population, and they will change in Europe too in a few short months too. If you do not have an IPv6 plan, then this is your new significant business risk – how will users with v6 only connections reach your content? And if this is through a translation mechanism, how will you ensure quality, or that your end-to-end protocols (like voice, video, etc.) will work ?
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It certainly doesn’t help when IP addresses are tossed around willy nilly.
A few months ago, I had to choose a supplier for a new leased line at the office.
When comparing providers, even six months ago, the number of IP addresses a provider could throw at us was a selling feature. We only needed a few addreses, but the minimum anyone would supply was 16.
So clearly the message has still not sunk in, when salesmen are still trying to outdo each other on IP allocation sizes offered, without even being asked to compete on this basis.
Posted by joe | April 14, 2011, 10:19 amJoe, I can do you a line with 65,000 subnets of 18,446,744,073,709,552,000 addresses. The good future proof ones too. ;-)
Posted by andy | April 14, 2011, 10:23 am