I have a nice cache of IPv4 addresses in a storeroom. You see, It's basic supply and demand, if we do run out of IPv4 addresses, I can come in and save the day and sell the stock of IPv4 addresses that I have. At a nice markup, of course.
Let's do the math here ppl
we've got 4 quadrants of 8 bits each; that's 32-bits of space; which, directly, would be about 4.3 billion IP addresses or so.
of course, the 4 quadrants also mean different things; for the most part, we've got the network part and the machine part.
As far as the internet itself is concerned, of course all that will be "counted" in the total would be internet facing addresses. An Internet Facing address is given to a consumer via DHCP by their ISP, from a range of IP addresses that the ISP "owns".
Generally, an ISP often purchases a number of network IPs equal to the expected number of consumers; the 65536 IPs available when they purchase a single network IP (the first part) is often enough for the medium sized companies. and they usually just get a number of them if necessary.
In any case, the entire thing is blown way out of proportion. The actions being taken are no different then when we were "running out of phone numbers" in some cases; most phone numbers are a 3 letter prefix followed by a 4-letter designator; in total, this give you only 10^7 (or 10,000,000) different phone numbers. Clearly, 10 million doesn't even come close to what is done now; so when that "limit" was being approached (and possibly long before it ) they devised the concept of area codes- simply tack on another set of digits in front of the 7 digits, call it an area code and be done with it. This meant that there were 10 million phone numbers for every possible area code; so far, this has proven more then sufficient; the total sum is 10^10, or 10 trillion different phone numbers, which will serve us just fine for the foreseeable future.
That's simply the way any industry like that works; you have an initial launch that has a limitation, but at the time it seems like it will never be reached- 10 million people using phones? bah, impossible. a program that needs more then 640K of memory? ridiculous. unfathomable. The same goes for BIOS limitations regarding hard drive size; at it's core, the limitation isn't with the technology, but rather the way we represent numbers using that technology. Take LBA and hard drives; basically, a hard drive says "hey, I have this many Logical Blocks" using a defined standard; the limitation here is the size of the number that the hard drive can give back; through the years this has gotten larger and larger, and everytime people figure "well, that's done, we'll
never need to make it any bigger" but of course, they do. What it boils down to is us trying to create an infinite number space and store it within a finite space. It's not possible, so we make compromises.
As far as IPv4 is concerned- will we run out? You betcha, of course we will- it's simply the way things go. As long as we continue to reason out stuff like "well, golly gee, that's like the same number of atoms in the universe, we'll never use them all" and then you have companies literally buying out huge chunks of that seemingly limitless space making it so the number is approached. (this is practically what happened to Ipv4) IPv6 seems limitless- Why would we need that many? I don't know. That's probably what people said when they wondered wether the 4.3 Billion different addresses with IPv4 was enough. At the time it was conceived the internet was hardly the popular everybody uses it all the time thing it is today, so 4.3 billion seemed like a huge, almost unreachable number; something that we would never approach ever. Maybe something new will come along that gobbles up a million IP addresses or something, I don't know, it's unforeseeable.
Lastly, as I've touched on, there is a difference between "used" addresses and "allocated" addresses. Most of the otherwise usable IP addresses were purchased by corporations early on- those count as unallocated, but are unused.
Also, I find this "source" interesting:
http://www.bizreport.com/2010/09/us-running-out-of-ip-addresses-white-house-issues-advisory.html#truly, all the various sources on this often say that the "proliferation of blackberries, laptops, and so forth" are causing this loss of free internet addresses, while ignoring the fact that such devices get their IP addresses from local LAN networks, most likely a wireless router, and therefore are not using up "any more" IPs- the router is still the only internet facing device.
This in addition to saying that IPv6 is "widely known" as something that almost nobody has heard of, which sort of goes against the meaning of "widely known".
In an interesting twist, all of the news articles and specifically the "white house urging"- basically, if one was to translate it to dialog, their method of solving the problem is this:
WH: Oh no. we're running out of IP addresses. Don't worry, we know how to fix it! ISPS!
ISPS: yes?
WH: Use IPv6!
ISPS: we've been working on integrating that into our systems for years, it's an ongoing project...
WH: Well, do it faster! Whew, now that we've averted that crisis, what else is on the agenda?
Anyway, it reminded me of
this blog post; specifically, the quote from a seventh grader when asked how they would address the nation if they became president:
Something must be done, and I will make it happen.
The whole situation with news networks and such is equally interesting; basically, they "report" that this is news once every few months, and oddly the proximity to this "limit" never changes. Why just last year I'm quite certain there were reports that the US was within 1% of running out of addresses. Do they just make up random numbers or something?
