Incoherent Babble

Found a cool post in my RSS feeds this morning: IP Registry Statistics

Stephen (who, by the way, lives in Boston, the lucky shmuck…) has setup a script that aggregates all the IP WHOIS data from the various IANA-designated organizations and runs some interesting statistics on them. Since I’m a statistics addict, I had to pose a few questions and observations. My response got far too lengthy for a simple comment, so here we go…

Since all their member countries are listed individually, why does the European Union have so many IPs? Wouldn’t the EU only represent actual government-used addresses?

That must be one hell of a database with 2.5 billion IP address records in it… I take it it’s running on MySQL? I’d love to see some automated processing, possibly spitting out aggregate numbers for historical reports (imagine the pretty IPs -> IP Exhaustion graphs).

I find it interesting that, according to Wikipedia, industry experts expect us to run out of IPv4 addresses sometime between March and May in the year 2010; but that here we are in August of 2007 and we’ve only used 2,534,086,476 of the available 4,294,967,296¹ public IP addresses.

Talk about an exponential increase in usage. In the entire history of IP-based computing, we’ve used (about) half of the IPs, but in less than 3 years we’re going to use the other half? Just out of curiosity, I had to do some math.

Do you realize that, assuming we meet their expectations of running out of the remaining 1,760,880,820 IPs by March, 2010 (about 950 days away), that means we’re allocating a net of 1,853,558 additional IPs a day? That’s almost 2 million IPs a day…

That’s 1,287 IPs every minute, 21.5 IPs per second.

Somehow this seems unreasonable to me… But then, I guess I’m not an industry expert, huh?

1. Per the above Wikipedia entry. This doesn’t exclude private subnets or multicast addresses, so my later figures aren’t going to be entirely accurate - just mostly. [back]