[network] The digital divide on IP addresses

(This post was updated in http://www.petersgriddle.net/2010/05/digital-divide-on-ip-addresses.html)

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).

Country	IP space	Inhabitants	Ratio
Vatican City	8,192	1,000	8.19
United States	1,324,925,184	278,357,000	4.76
Canada	67,430,400	31,147,000	2.16
Gibraltar	47,104	25,000	1.88
Monaco	63,488	34,000	1.87
Iceland	514,048	279,000	1.84
Liechtenstein	51,232	32,300	1.59
Finland	7,587,712	5,171,300	1.47
Australia	26,868,224	18,886,000	1.42
Sweden	12,314,752	8,861,400	1.39
Denmark	6,912,960	5,330,000	1.30
Norway	5,595,680	4,478,500	1.25
United Kingdom	73,804,824	59,623,400	1.24
New Zealand	4,436,224	3,862,000	1.15
Japan	142,997,248	126,714,000	1.13
Bermuda	67,072	65,000	1.03
Netherlands	16,400,808	15,864,000	1.03
Switzerland	6,915,008	7,160,400	0.97
Hong Kong	6,291,712	6,782,000	0.93
South Korea	41,907,456	46,844,000	0.89
Singapore	2,857,472	3,567,000	0.80
Ireland	2,942,880	3,775,100	0.78
France	45,161,856	59,225,700	0.76
Malta	283,648	380,200	0.75
Taiwan	16,280,064	22,256,000	0.73
Austria	5,788,064	8,091,800	0.72
Tuvalu	8,192	12,000	0.68
Nauru	8,192	12,000	0.68
Luxembourg	283,392	435,700	0.65
Norfolk Island	1,280	2,000	0.64
Germany	51,132,368	82,164,700	0.62
World population	3,700,000,000	6,490,757,730	0.57

 

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.