2014 in IPv4 addresses: closing the books on IPv4

▼ Ten years ago, I published my first "IPv4 address use report" over 2005. After that, I did 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010. Today, I'm going back to the well one last time and provide an overview of what happened with the IPv4 addresses the past decade, which will close the book on the IPv4 address space as far as I'm concerned.

At the end of 2005, 2056.30 million of the 3706.65 usable IPv4 addresses had been given out: 55%. Today, it's 3592.99 million, which is 97%. Can you imagine driving a car with a tank filled to 3%? Or work on a computer with a drive that's 97% full?

All the numbers I present here are based on those published on the FTP servers of the five Regional Internet Registries that give out IP addresses. So an address is "in use" if an RIR has given it to an ISP or directly to an end-user organization. Whether that ISP or that organization actually uses the address is something we can't tell from these numbers.

Let me first explain the 3706.65 million number. IP addresses are 32 bits long, which means there's 2³² = 4,294,967,296 of them: 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255, or 256 blocks of 16,777,216 addresses that start with the same number. We call one of those a "/8" in the business. 0/8 (or 0.0.0.0/8, which is 0.0.0.0 - 0.255.255.255) and 127/8 can't be used because they each contain one special address. 224/4 (everything starting with 224 to 239) is used for multicast and 224/4 (240 - 255) is "reserved for future use". This prompted some programmers who are a bit too fond of input validation to reject those addresses. As a result, those addresses can't be used on many systems, some of which are no longer updated, but still used. So 268 million perfectly good IPv4 addresses will probably remain unused forever. Last but not least, there's the 17,891,328 addresses set aside for private use: 10/8,172.16/12 and 192.168/16. So the total usable IPv4 address space is 222 × 16,777,216 - 17,891,328 = 3,706,650,624.

By downloading the old address delegation records from the RIR FTP servers it's possible to see how many addresses were given out at the end of each year. (Looking at just the latest files gives different results because addresses that have been returned in the meantime aren't listed in those.) This is the number of IPv4 addresses given out as of the end of the last ten years:

This is the net difference between each year and the previous year:

In this graph, the year 2014 looks strange, as two old class A blocks (16.78 million addresses each) that are used in Europe now fall under the RIPE NCC, while they were previously listed in the ARIN statistics. If we exclude all the "legacy" /8 blocks, the trend makes more sense:

(However, now there's a spike in 2012 for ARIN as a few of these blocks changed their status.)

APNIC and the RIPE NCC have been running on fumes for the past several years: ISPs in their region can only get one last block of 1024 addresses after those two dipped below the 16.78 million address mark (a /8 block). This happened in 2011 for APNIC and in 2012 for the RIPE NCC. This year, ARIN and LACNIC also reached a similar status, although ARIN doesn't use the "one last block" policy.

As a result, organizations that need IPv4 addresses now have to buy them from others who can spare some. IPv4 address transfers were especially big in the RIPE region in 2014. In the ARIN region, the number of transfers was limited at 180 in five years, but the size of the blocks transferred tended to be large; apparently here transfers were mainly used to get larger amounts of address space than what could (then still) be obtained directly from ARIN. Inter-RIR transfers are now also possible, and happen exclusively from the ARIN region to the APNIC region. See the RIPE and ARIN transfer statistics on their websites and APNIC's on their FTP server.

This is how three kinds of numbers compare: the addresses given out with a datestamp of 2014, the net difference between the total number of IPv4 addresses given out, and the number of addresses transferred in 2014:

                   AfriNIC APNIC   ARIN    LACNIC  RIPE NCC
 
Given out 2014:    12.45    3.77   26.06   19.11    2.61
 
Intra-RIR
transfers 2014:             3.85    2.98            9.61
   
Inter-RIR
transfers 2014:             1.10   -1.10
 
Net difference
2014-01-01 -       12.72    4.62   18.82   18.74    0.27
2015-01-01:    
   

When I compiled my first statistics over 2005, this was the list of the 15 biggest IPv4 address users:

Country   Addresses
 
US      1324.93 M        United States
JP       143.00 M        Japan
EU       113.87 M        Multi-country in Europe
CN        74.39 M        China
CA        67.43 M        Canada
DE        51.13 M        Germany
FR        45.16 M        France
KR        41.91 M        Korea
UK        40.18 M        United Kingdom
GB        33.63 M        Great Britain
AU        26.87 M        Australia
IT        18.39 M        Italy
BR        17.17 M        Brazil
NL        16.40 M        Netherlands
ES        16.29 M        Spain

Nine years later, the list looks like this:

Country   Addresses
 
US       1596.02 M        United States
CN        331.99 M        China
JP        202.61 M        Japan
GB        123.75 M        United Kingdom
DE        118.91 M        Germany
KR        112.32 M        South Korea
FR         84.05 M        France
BR         81.02 M        Brazil
CA         80.41 M        Canada
IT         53.44 M        Italy
AU         48.48 M        Australia   
NL         45.94 M        Netherlands
RU         45.55 M        Russian Federation
IN         36.36 M        India
TW         35.47 M        Taiwan

Surprisingly little has changed, although the BRIC countries have claimed a bigger piece of the pie. I don't know why India has barely a tenth of the number of IPv4 addresses that China has.

So long IPv4, it's been good knowing you.

Permalink - posted 2015-01-08

Should Swiss watch makers attempt a smartwatch?

▼ Matt Richman thinks that TAG Heuer, maker of Swiss luxury watches, shouldn't waste time making a smartwatch:

TAG Heuer’s smartwatch won’t sell. There’s no market for it.

In order to have even a chance of being as feature-rich as Apple Watch, then, TAG’s smartwatch will have to pair with an Android phone. However, TAG wearers aren’t Android users. Rich people buy TAG watches, but rich people don’t buy Android phones.

I couldn't disagree more.

At this point, the Apple Watch is barely more than vaporware. The ascend of the smartwatch is in the very early stages. All kinds of things can happen.

Yes, Apple has three advantages: the most desirable potential smartwatch wearers tend to be iPhone users, and Apple can integrate the Apple Watch and the iPhone any way they see fit. They're also in the position to build custom chips.

So yes, Apple is going to be in the best position to do what Apple is doing: building a smartwatch that's barely more than a dumb terminal that uses the iPhone's computing power. However, that's more a limitation than a feature. Wouldn't a smartwatch with its own cellular connectivity be much better? It's probably too early for that right now, but that could change a few years down the road.

Also, how necessary is the deep integration between the phone and the watch? Most watch functions that need an assist from the phone could work just fine using a third-party app that runs in the background on the iPhone. The main issue would be the phone-related features, but apparently the Pebble can hook into those to a reasonable extent today.

Last but not least, Apple needs to sell tens of millions of watches to make for a viable new product category. This means the average price will have to be much lower than the price of a Swiss luxury watch. So Apple needs to depend on scale to provide value, while a company like TAG Hueur can use much more expensive materials and processes and still have good margins, although they'd have to depend more on off-the-shelf electronics.

Sure, it's entirely possible that the Swiss luxury watch makers are in trouble. But it's still way too early to write them off.

Permalink - posted 2015-01-07

iPhone 6 network speed

▼ It was only a few months ago that I first got 4G/LTE working on my iPhone 5 using a Vodafone NL prepaid SIM, and the results weren't very spectacular: at home, I got 12 Mbps down, which is actually slightly slower than the 3G I get from KPN. Up speed was respectable at 5 or 6 Mbps. In the city center I got slightly better speeds at 20/20 Mbps.

So I was very curious what the iPhone 6, which supports many more LTE frequency bands, would do on the Vodafone LTE network. So I popped in the SIM... and nothing happened. Despite my best efforts and many reboots, I was stuck on 3G for almost a day. Or even GPRS on the 2G network:

Not sure if that did the trick, but I finally got 4G after resetting my network settings. When I first popped in the SIM, I got a text message with a link to a provisioning profile, but that seems to give me the same settings that also appear automatically. However, when I later put my KPN SIM back in the phone, I couldn't get any data service until I removed the Vodafone provisioning profile.

I did some testing as I was traveling home by train, and I got various speeds, starting at about 20/20 Mbps down and up and going as high as 68/36 Mbps:

It's too bad that data plans are so limited and/or expensive, as you can burn though a gigabyte of data in two minutes at these speeds. Vodafone NL apparently doesn't support Voice over LTE yet, as I dropped down to 3G as soon as I made a voice call.

Wi-Fi has also been improved—but only on the 5 GHz band. On the 2.4 GHz band, you still get a maximum of 72 Mbps 802.11n:

The iPhone 5 and 5S did 150 Mbps 802.11n on the 5 GHz band; the iPhone 6 adds 433 Mbps 802.11ac:

These speeds are a good deal lower than what you get on a computer because computers usually have three antennas, which means they can be three times as fast if three data streams can reach the antennas independently. With only one Wi-Fi antenna, the iPhone is limited to 433 Mbps, but it'll reach that maximum more often.

Transferring files between my computer and the iPhone using iTunes, I got about 7 megabytes per second on the 2.4 GHz band, which completely saturates the channel. I got 15 to 22 Mbps on 5 GHz, which doesn't come close to saturating the channel. So if you're still using a 2.4 GHz only Wi-Fi base station or home router, you may want to consider upgrading it to something that supports at least 802.11n—preferably 802.11ac—on the 5 GHz band and you'll get better speed more consistently.

I would have loved to test Bluetooth 4.0 performance, but the iPhone doesn't support file transfers over Bluetooth. Annoying. Nokia could do this more than ten years ago. Apparently they want us to use their proprietary AirDrop system instead. I've seen this work very quickly between two Macs recently, but between my Mac and my iPhone, it takes forever for the two to "see" each other and the transfers then happen at about 5 megabytes per second.

Bottom line: the iPhone 6's networking can be very fast, but it all depends on the SIMs, Wi-Fi base stations, frequency bands and transfer protocols. So I'm glad it still comes with a USB cable, even if it's only USB 2.

Permalink - posted 2014-12-28