Why IPv4 Addresses Are Like Oil

IPv4 addresses are an increasingly rare resource. But I'd not spotted the parallel with oil until this:

the US was still the largest user of new IPv4 addresses in 2008 with 50.08 million addresses used. China was a close second with 46.5 million new addresses last year, an increase of 34 percent.

Although China and Brazil saw huge increases in their address use, suggesting that the developing world is demanding a bigger part of the pie while IPv4 addresses last, what's really going on is more complex. India is still stuck in 18th place between the Netherlands and Sweden at 18.06 million addresses—only a tenth of what China has. And Canada, the UK, and France saw little or no increase in their numbers of addresses, while similar countries like Germany, Korea, and Italy saw double-digit percentage increases.

A possible explanation could be that the big player(s) in some countries are executing a "run on the bank" and trying to get IPv4 addresses while the getting is good, while those in other countries are working on more NAT (Network Address Translation) and other address conservation techniques in anticipation of the depletion of the IPv4 address reserves a few years from now.

In other words, the greediest countries - the US and China - are rushing to burn up all the oil while there's some left, and to hell with what happens afterwards....

Reasons to Be Tearful

Want one more thing to worry about? Try this. (Via Pluggd.in.)

Easy Access to IPv6 at Last?

You probably don't realise it, but the Internet is a dinosaur. More specially, the Internet numbering system is palaeolithic, and needs sorting out. Ironically, the solution has been around for years (I first wrote about it nearly a decade ago). It's called IPv6, and instead of the measly 4 billion or so addresses that IPv4 allows (and which are allocated in a particularly arbitrary way), IPv6 will give us

340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456

of them, which should keep us going for a while.

And yet we hear little of IPv6 these days. So I was glad to see that down-under they are doing something on this front with the IPv6 for e-Business initiative. As well as scads of useful IPv6 resources, this site also has links to a highly-practical outcome of the Australian project, the memorably-named "Easy Access Device":

The Easy Access Device (EAD) has been developed with the purpose of providing a small businesses (leas than 50 employees) with a simple, easy to use IPv6 Internet access device. The system is designed as a small unit that would be installed in a small business, and connects directly into a DSL, cable or wireless broadband termination unit (typically a modem). The unit provides the basic network services normally required at a small office network boundary for both IPv6 and IPv4 networks.

Apparently it's a PC box running Ubuntu. Providing a cheap solution is probably as good a way as any of moving on from the poor old IPv4.

IPv6: You Know It Makes Sense

The Internet is deeply, deeply broken, it's just that nobody's noticed. Fortunately, the solution is already to hand. Unfortunately, nobody is really bothering to use it. It's called IPv6, and is version 6 of the Internet Protocol that holds the Internet together; we're currently all running version 4, and it's just not working (version 5 seems to have got lost somewhere).

If you want to know why IPv6 is important and fun, read this great article, with more to come.