Growth in IP addresses despite global slowdown: Research

The recession that has lead to the restructuring of the of the global economy actually proved to be a go-ahead time for the Internet users. There was a major exhaustion of the IP addresses in 2009, despite the furore of global meltdown.

In a new report by Geoff Huston, Chief Scientist at the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC) named '2009 in Review - the IP Address Registry Perspective', the IP addresses allocation pointed out that a growing Asia Pacific ICT sectors and high penetration rates for mobile Internet globally are the two major trends that have dominated the IP address pool.

Of the 190.1 million IPv4 addresses allocated during the year, just under half (45.87%) were allocated in the Asia Pacific, with China consuming more IPv4 addresses than any other economy. China has a very high number - the largest number of Internet users (around 385 million) and cellphone users (over 700 million)

Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Australia also showed strong growth.

Geoff Huston explained that although address consumption was down by 5% on 2008 figures yet the unallocated IPv4 addresses could be exhausted earlier than expected.

The Ipv4 address exhaustion is being fueled by the growth in mobile Internet.

Technological changes like Apple's iPhone and Google's Android are driving the growth in the mobile market which in turn is spiking the allocation graph of IPv4.

The report has also outlined the urgency to adopt IPv6 as early as possible in the crisis of the crunch of the IP addresses. APNIC and its associated bodies have lobbied the ICT industry, government and supply chains to ramp up the move to IPv6 for some time.

Huston commented “The message on IPv6 deployment is spreading, with a global increase in the number of economies now with IPv6 resource holdings increasing by 17%”.

The Number Resource Organization (NRO), the official representative of the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) that oversee the allocation of all Internet number resources, have also recently announced that less than 10 percent of available IPv4 addresses remain unallocated.

With less than 10% of the IPv4 address space is now available for allocation worldwide and its is widely accepted that this space will become exhausted by early 2011. This is the foremost challenge that telecom operators & the regulator in India foresee ahead of 3G rollout in the country. As per a study conducted by Cisco, IPv4 address will exhaust by the end of September 2011 worldwide.

Earlier the allocation of IPv4 address in India was very limited, due to low broadband penetration and low usage of high-end phones. After the allocation of 3G spectrum and start of 3G services, the penetration will increase and considering the size of the Indian telephony market, IPv4 addresses may exhaust before 2011.

Global digital economy is dependent upon seamless global addressing and availability of IP addresses. Hence the only solution for operators is to migrate to IPv6 and Indian telecom operators need to start preparing themselves and adapt to the changes before its late.

archansi@cybermedia.co.in