Peter's Griddle

Every computer connecting to the Internet has to have an Internet address. No problem, you would say, unless you realize that there are more people living on the earth than there are Internet addresses.

Internet addresses are defined by the Internet Protocol (IP for short), which is currently in its version 4 (and has been since it left the labs). IP version 6 is going to solve the address space problem, if only it were deployed on a large scale. Unfortunately, it is a massive cutover, and will probably touch more computers and software than the millennium problem and the conversion to the Euro combined. And nobody seems to be in a hurry! According to Iljitsch van Beijnum, who wrote a book on IPv6: “IP addresses will never really run out, much like a tube of toothpaste, or an oilfield, is never completely empty. There is always some more that you can squeeze out.”
That may be true, but the price will go up soon. Estimates are that between the years 2010 and 2012 IPv4 addresses will become really hard to get.

So, one way of looking at the impending transition is to see where the addresses are today and who will be needing them in the near future. Iljitsch shares some thought on the latter on his weblog.

Here I want to look at where the addresses currently are. For that we took a recent look at the current (January 2006) statistics and came up with the following listing. It shows that 31 countries have more than their fair share of IP addresses, and 18 countries even have more IP addresses than inhabitants (including all babies, etc).



There are a few points here: if the other countries will reach the same development level as the top 30, there won’t be enough addresses to serve them. The hunger for new addresses will be felt most severely in India (which has 1 address for every 165 inhabitants) and China (1 address per 17 inhabitants). Together these account for 2.3 billion inhabitants, in need of 2.2 billion addresses, while there are only 1.5 billion addresses left right now.