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Re: [LUG] OT: Fwd: Net approaches addressing limit

 

On 12/05/2010 08:57, Gordon Henderson wrote:
On Wed, 12 May 2010, James Fidell wrote:

Simon Waters wrote:

Afraid "IPv4 address exhaustion" is up there with "the rapture" and "the
return of the messiah" as long expected. The only difference being we
know IPv4 addresses exist.

This is true.  People have been talking about the imminent exhaustion of
the IPv4 address space for ten years or more.

At least 15 years...

I was working for an ISP in 1995 when the great debate was kicking off and CIDR was "invented" Lots of routers back then (ie. cisco) were buggy as they had all the netmasks for the old "Class A,B,C" networks hard-wired into them. We were using BSD boxes as routers back then, so didn't really have any issues with the "experimental" /16's RIPE gave us (out of Class A space) to .. er .. experiment with. (And people today still talk about Class A, B, .. networks )-:

There are still large pockets of unsed IP's and their owners will be squeezed into releasing them in time - that won't solve the problem, just delay it a while.

However there is still a lot of kit (routers, etc.) out there that's not IPv6 ready - and it never will be, so people who've invested in this kit will not want to change - just yet anyway.

Enta are supposed to have ipv6 offerings - might chase them up about it... My co-lo hosting provider isn't really intersted in it right now though, and I suspect that's the case with a lot of them, however a friend who runs another ISP in Bristol has embraced ipv6, so I might chat to him about his experiences with it so-far...

Gordon

I think one point (sort of) made in the article is that in general home users tend to have more devices connected to the Internet than they used to, and that accelerates the use of IP addresses, such as games consoles and smartphones. If I had either (which I don't yet) I would as a home user potentially consume 3 IP addresses whereas the most I would consume previously would be one. Also residential when dialup was more common, ISPs used to be able to get by with only owning the number of IP addresses the average number of customers they had online at once would need, so for example if they had 2m customers but on average only 10% online at any one time they'd need 200,000 IPs. With the massive increase in broadband of recent years and all countries pushing for more, ISPs now have to face the possibility of all those 2m being online at once, multiplying the number of IPs they need massively. Also AIUI cable TV boxes are allocated an IP on the company's network, which inflates the number of IPs home users consume even further.

Julian

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