I am bugged that the BEAD programs do not seem to grok that we are indeed out of IPv4 space, and that the federal government is sitting on 10? 11 idle /8s.
Alarmists have been telling us for at least 15 years that the IPv4 space is about to be exhausted and how disastrous that will be. So far, nothing has happened.
It strikes me that we've "run out" of IPv4 address space but there's entire large blocks of space allocated to entities that don't appear to be using them.
IPv4 is only "depleted" in a very technical sense. The last free /8 was allocated to a regional authority. This does not mean no IPv4 addresses are available.
The regional authorities (RIRs), the guys who actually allocate the addresses to user organizations, still have many, many blocks to allocate. The first RIR isn't expected to run out of ipv4 space until October.
That's when the shit really hits the fan -- requests for IPv4 space start to be rejected, ISPs start deploying NAT or 6RD, network administrators start jumping from windows etc.
> How many ipv4 are in poss2of the US Gov and military? Do they really need all of those?
You're not the first person to ask this, and the answer is: not nearly enough.
Demand for IPv4 is orders of magnitude larger than the current address space. There is no level of freeing up addresses that can make this problem go away. At most we're buying us a few months until we run out again.
Well, I’m entirely willing to believe the US DoD is one of the few entities that have more than 2^23 computers they want to be mutually addressable, so the RFC 1918 space is just too small for them if they are to run IPv4.
Yeah, IPv4 is pretty much empty. Lots of companies own a /8 all to themselves, like Xerox (13.0.0.0/8), Apple (17.0.0.0/8), USPS (56.0.0.0/8) and Ford (19.0.0.0/8) to name a few. None of them allocate even the tiniest portion of them.
I would pretty strongly oppose the notion we're using it "fine". IPv4 address allocation requests are on waiting lists. As of November, almost all requests have stopped fulfilling. We've completely run out of them.
I've seen the math done on the unused IPv4 space by some institutions. In the end, even if an organization gave up their entire /8, you get something like 1 to 2 months of extra time at best.
To address your edit, they still do because it doesn’t really matter. We have mitigated IPv4 exhaustion with NAT, and IPv6 adoption is still growing. No one cares enough to try to do anything about it.
If you made a list of “most popular concerns about the Internet in 2021,” the size of U.S. federal IP space would be pretty far down.
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