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No more IPv4 addresses in Latin America and the Caribbean

lacnic.net

21–30 of 48 posts

Re: No more IPv4 addresses in Latin America and the Caribbean

#21
post #9

What are the practical consumer-level implications of this? My understanding is that every internet-enabled device needs a unique IP address. If there are no more unique addresses, can no more devices connect to the internet in this region?

Excuse me if I'm being dense, but why does every internet enabled device need a unique IP? I thought the service providers had unique IPs and we just made our requests through them.

You don't need a unique IP, your ISP can use NAT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT

This is where many people can share one IP. But NAT has problems - you can make connections, but you can't accept connections from elsewhere. And it sometimes breaks particular applications.

The only real solution is widespread IPv6 adoption, which seems depressingly unlikely right now.

Re: No more IPv4 addresses in Latin America and the Caribbean

#22
post #19

I don't have a good feel for the numbers involved here. Things like this always report: "We are out!... only 4,000,000 or so addressed remaining!" Four million sounds like a lot to me. Some number of the IP addresses that are counted as gone are also still unused. Can someone give me some idea of the situation with numbers that are easier to understand? Can we still limp through for a few years, or is this actually t…

Well they give you another figure for scale: > Since it began operating in 2002, the organization has assigned more than 182 million IPv4 addresses throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. 182 million addresses in 12 years is roughly 15 million addresses per year, or 1.25 million addresses per month. At that rate 4 million addresses would last maybe 3 months.

Yes, but they could have issued 30m each to 5 different ISPs that are only half way through their allotment. If I want a fixed IP at my house or my school I don't get it from the internet address registry, I get it from Boston University or RCN.

Re: No more IPv4 addresses in Latin America and the Caribbean

#23
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the next big step for ISP's is to provide IPv6-only native service to their clients, and add IPv6-to-IPv4 gateways to allow access to IPv4-only internet Isn't that pretty much how DS-lite works?

Sort of. DS-Lite involves a Carrier Grade NAT as well. Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_transition_mechanisms for all the different possible mechanism devised so far. Edit: for my money, NAT64 + DNS64 would get us 90% of the way there. OS support for pseudo-IPv4 would really fix this 100%: if the application wants to talk IPv4, the OS would transparently translate it into an IPv6 address in the 64:ff9…

See T-Mobile's latest presentation for details on 464: https://www.nanog.org/meetings/abstract?id=2359

Personally, DS-Lite seems cleaner but I don't think it's worth arguing about.

Re: No more IPv4 addresses in Latin America and the Caribbean

#25
post #17
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carrier-Grade NAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT As in what is (unfortunately) actually being used. ISP's have taken so long to even begin to look at moving to IPv6 that stopgaps like CGN have to be put in place. Then, of course, why break what is working so IPv6 is put off even further.

Reminds me of fossil fuels and other sustainability issues...

That's actually exactly what this is. Currently coal is the cheapest electricity you can get. However, as the price of coal, oil, and natural gas goes up, and as the price of cleaner alternatives (through research, scale, etc.) goes down, we will eventually arrive at using much cleaner energy. The big problem with this is that those two prices aren't moving fast enough to avoid a global climate disaster we will be facing within several decades.

Re: No more IPv4 addresses in Latin America and the Caribbean

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excuse me if I'm being dense, but why does every internet enabled device need a unique IP? I thought the service providers had unique IPs and we just made our requests through them.

You don't need a unique IP, your ISP can use NAT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT This is where many people can share one IP. But NAT has problems - you can make connections, but you can't accept connections from elsewhere. And it sometimes breaks particular applications. The only real solution is widespread IPv6 adoption, which seems depressingly unlikely right now.

> The only real solution is widespread IPv6 adoption, which seems depressingly unlikely right now

Slow maybe, but unlikely? No, not really. IPv6 internet has grown fairly steadily (and afaik at a growing pace) since its inception and I don't see any reason why that trend would slow down or stop. There hasn't been any real opposition or alternatives for IPv6, mostly just indifference and ignorance. More and more new gear supporting IPv6 natively out of the box is being deployed on the field, reasons for not enabling it are dwindling. XP just got deprecated, most end-user stuff probably already supports IPv6. Old network engineers retire someday, and new generation is well aware of the issue at hand.

Re: No more IPv4 addresses in Latin America and the Caribbean

#27
post #17
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carrier-Grade NAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT As in what is (unfortunately) actually being used. ISP's have taken so long to even begin to look at moving to IPv6 that stopgaps like CGN have to be put in place. Then, of course, why break what is working so IPv6 is put off even further.

Reminds me of fossil fuels and other sustainability issues...

That's why the current incarnation of Capitalism (finance-based, quarterly-results oriented) is broken beyond repair. Kicking the can down the road sound like a hell of an option if you can be relatively sure there will be a different guy doing all the eventual cleanup.

Re: No more IPv4 addresses in Latin America and the Caribbean

#29
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of. DS-Lite involves a Carrier Grade NAT as well. Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_transition_mechanisms for all the different possible mechanism devised so far. Edit: for my money, NAT64 + DNS64 would get us 90% of the way there. OS support for pseudo-IPv4 would really fix this 100%: if the application wants to talk IPv4, the OS would transparently translate it into an IPv6 address in the 64:ff9…

See T-Mobile's latest presentation for details on 464: https://www.nanog.org/meetings/abstract?id=2359 Personally, DS-Lite seems cleaner but I don't think it's worth arguing about.

> See T-Mobile's latest presentation for details on 464: https://www.nanog.org/meetings/abstract?id=2359

From slide 8:

> Mobile networks don’t use DHCP, so no way to setup MAP or DS-lite without some heavy lifting in protocols and standards

Why can't the handset itself do the DS-lite IPv4 NAT/encapsulation, or why is 464XLAT easier to do on handset than DS-lite?

edit: found this gold-nugget of a slide: http://i.imgur.com/VhMSA2p.png ... ugh, just kinda weird/sad that this is still such an open problem.

Re: No more IPv4 addresses in Latin America and the Caribbean

#30
post #24

[deleted]

> Most homes and even many businesses probably don't need a unique IP.

The answer is then not IP but port scarcity. Depending on home activity, I have 100~400 sessions open on my router. This means as an ISP you can only have so much customers (10~50?) behind a single IP and assume reliable operation. With the growth in number of devices and online services, this is only bound to grow and is thus not a viable solution, even short term.

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