There are a ton of /8 still assigned to companies that don't need them.<p>Ford, GE, IBM, AT&T (x2), Xerox, HP (x2), Apple, MIT, CSC, Eli Lilly, Nortel, Prudential Insurance, DuPont, Cap Debis, Merck, SITA.<p>All of those can return their /8. That's 18 /8 potentially available.<p>And does the DoD really need 12 /8's? I get that they want to network every person, gun, ship, tank, truck and plane. But none of those need to be on the public internet. (Well, maybe the people do - but 1 /8 should be enough for that.)
Meanwhile, in Europe, RIPE ran out of IPv4 a year ago[1], and people have been happily implementing IPv6 ever since. In Sweden, there is a government directive[2] that all state infrastructure should implement IPv6 and DNSSEC by this year (2013) at the latest.<p>1) <a href="https://www.ripe.net/internet-coordination/ipv4-exhaustion" rel="nofollow">https://www.ripe.net/internet-coordination/ipv4-exhaustion</a><p>2) <a href="http://www.regeringen.se/sb/d/15234/a/177127" rel="nofollow">http://www.regeringen.se/sb/d/15234/a/177127</a>
Bah. All this IPV4 "exhaustion" stuff can be simply solved. Almost overnight. Right now, most of the space is underused and simply being hoarded.<p>Want to free up 90% of the IPs? Easily? Then <i>charge</i> for them!!!<p>If MIT had to pay $1/mo for each IP address ($16 million per month), it would immediately give most of them back.<p>If MIT had to pay $1/year for each IP address ($16 million per year), it would immediately give most of them back.<p>And yet for people like me, paying (in round numbers) $50 / month for Internet, $1/year or even $1/month would be "in the noise".<p>So how many hundreds of billions of dollars will instead be spent on the designed-by-nerds very-difficult-to-implement not-very-backward-compatible solution of IPV6?
I'd really hoped we'd have more support for IPv6 by now. It's funny, every so often there's a big "We need IPv6" push with lots of media coverage which is forgotten about shortly afterwards.<p>As far as I know there's only one ISP (Internode) here in Australia which offers IPv6.
There's always been a vocal group who maintains that the IP addresses that are not visible on the internet should be returned. There are a number of problems with this argument.<p>Firstly, there are legitimate business reasons for having assigned, non-RFC1918 addresses that are only used internally. Interconnecting private networks belonging to different organizations that have overlapping 10.x addresses is a painful process. Sure it's possible to NAT, but given that the IP addresses are effectively an asset of the organization, why not use them? I'm not implying that this is right, but it's how the system was in the past and the cost of changing internal networking and applications could be very high.<p>Secondly, how do you prove that an IP address is accessible on the Internet? Many IPs do not respond to pings and I can easily set up a device that will answer for all IPs behind the corporate gateways.
What's the time lag until we run out of IPv4 addresses at the VPS/hosting provider and broadband ISP level?<p>I see the situation getting progressively more dire, and presumably these notifications are there to try and get people moving to avoid the wall; but assuming everyone keeps operating as close to the status quo as they are able, how long before we truly hit the wall?
Some good information on this from Geoff Huston: <a href="http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2012-08/EndPt2.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2012-08/EndPt2.html</a>
Its not really so bad. Its not like end users need IP addresses. All you need is addresses for all the major servers, and then like a couple dozen for each ISP, right?