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Far and wide: This map was created using data from the researchers' census. About a quarter of the address space is still unassigned (blue), a quarter appears to be relatively densely populated (green), and nearly half of the space has few servers or did not respond to queries (red).
University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute
The new map of the Internet suggests that there is room for more hosts even if addresses are running out. The map reveals that, while roughly a quarter of all blocks of network addresses are heavily populated and therefore efficiently used, about half of the Internet is either used lightly or is located behind firewalls blocking responses to the survey. The last quarter of network blocks consists of addresses that can still be assigned in the future.
The USC research group used the most innocuous type of network packet to probe the farthest reaches of the Internet. Known as the Internet Control Message Protocol, or ICMP, this packet is typically used to send error messages between servers and other network hardware. Sending an ICMP packet to another host (an action known as pinging) is generally not seen as hostile, Heidemann says. "There are certainly people who misunderstand what we are doing," and interpret it as the prelude to an attack, he says. "By request, we remove them from the survey, but its fewer people than you might think. Pings are pretty innocuous."
The researchers found that ICMP pings stack up well against another method of host detection, the Internet's main means of transmitting data: the Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP. TCP-probing is a common technique used by network scanners, but it tends to take longer and is considered more aggressive than ICMP pings, so it may be blocked. To compare the effectiveness of each technique, the team probed a million random Internet addresses using both ICMP and TCP, finding a total of 54,297 active hosts. ICMP pings elicited a response from approximately three-quarters of visible hosts, while TCP probes garnered a response slightly less than two-thirds of the time.
In total, the researchers estimate that there are 112 million responsive addresses, with between 52 million and 60 million addresses assigned to hosts that are contactable 95 percent of the time.
The survey may miss computers behind firewalls or computers that do not respond to pings, but the overall conclusion--that the Internet has room to grow--is spot on, says Gordon Lyon, a security researcher who created the popular network scanning tool NMAP.
"There are huge chunks of IP space which are not allocated yet, and also giant swaths which are inefficiently allocated," Lyon says. "For example, Xerox, GE, IBM, HP, Apple, and Ford each have more than 16 million IP addresses to themselves because they were allocated when the Internet was just starting."
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Keep in mind that ipv6 headers are quite a bit larger, so the same amount of traffic will take more bandwidth. My point is that there are drawbacks to IPv6 that are rarely mentioned.
I think they are quite frequently mentioned, but for the VAST majority of the Internet's users the extra 20B or so will have no negative impact ... especially when weighed against the benefits (first and foremost - the continued growth of the internet)
/TJ
For those curious, the IPv4 address exhaustion date probably comes from something like this ... an excellent resource, and thanks to Geoff Huston for providing the site.
Anyway, the actual date isn't the important thing - from a big picture perspective, that is. The real issue is - can IPv4 scale to our needs for the forthcoming years, decades, etc. Factoring in the increasingly connected world we live in, with the definition of "network enabled device" changing (cel phones, gaming consoles, automobiles, sensor nets, etc.) I think the resounding answer is no.
So, do we spend lots of effort over the next 2 years prolonging IPv4 for 1-5 years beyond that, or do we "buy in" to the real answer and spend our time and effort primarily on that, while also working to ensure a semi-graceful period of coexistence?
For the really motivated, get active! The IETF is working on these semi-graceful coexistence efforts now'ish, here
Re: Probe Sees Unused Internet
Perhaps if the original class-A's used more VLSM on the outside, we could recover a bunch.
How many class-A's does any one firm need publically is the question. "Too Much" is no longer the answer.
I am very surprised that this is even being reported. There have been in-depth conversations on the utilization percentage vs. allocation, as well as the merits and pitfalls of reclaiming "legacy" space, for several years now within ARIN and the other RIRs. There have been a number of studies, using a number of different test methods. This one is certainly not the first in many years -- it's another in a long line of studies that have been performed in the last 10 years.
While it certainly makes sense to more widely publicize the issues surrounding IPv4 exhaustion and a conversion to IPv6, this article suggests that the answer has been staring us in the face all this time, and that everyone has been missing it.
The reality is that legacy address space reclamation is an ongoing effort that has been underway for years, as have efforts to improve utilization. The fact is that this study minimizes the blindness of its survey method and utterly ignores the fact that all the reclamation in the world will not do anything more than buy us another year or two, maybe less (as mentioned in another thread here).
IPv6 is a near-term necessity. IPv4 will not last much longer. IPv6 is available in all major OSs and appliances. There is no other alternative on the horizon. It's time to get to work resolving the remaining technical issues, and move forward!
(I am a co-author on the study that is described in this article.)
The article provides a nice summary of the issues, but it reaches a conclusion that is stronger supported by the study. The subhead of the article is "A survey shows that addresses are not running out as quickly as we'd thought", and the article draws the conclusion: "the problem [of IPv4 address exhaustion] may not be as bad as many fear."
The article's conclusion, I think, overly simplifies matters---it is only true if the "better things we should be doing in managing the IPv4 address space" are free. The Internet Census we carried out supports the opportunity for better IPv4 address space management. But an open question is the cost of such management. Historically, with plentiful IPv4 addresses, IPv4 management costs have been small, but potential better IPv4 management will likely be much more costly. This cost of ongoing IPv4 management needs to be weighed against the costs of one-time conversion cost to IPv6 coupled followed lower IPv6 management costs.
To me, one exciting conclusion from the Internet Census we carried out is that we now have data that allows us to start evaluating these trade-offs. The answer may be more careful IPv4 gets us a few years, or that the cost of more careful IPv4 makes IPv6 an obvious choice. In either case, resolving this transition is important for the Internet community.
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20 Comments
FTC ought to do campaign like they are with DTV09
The FTC ought to be doing a campaign exactly like they are with DTV 09.
It is absurd that most ISP's dont even have any IPv6. We keep asking & asking here in PDX & next to none of them have any to give us.
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