Connectivity Demands in Asia/Pacific Area

It appears that "the Asia Pacific's regional internet registry APNIC has placed its members on stringent IPv4 address rations, conceding it was now unable to meet IPv4 demands in the region." APNIC covers 56 countries, "from Afghanistan to Antartica". (Althought Antartica really isn't a country.)

APNIC has just 16.7 million remaining IPv4 addresses which it said were reserved for “essential connectivity” with the superseding protocol IPv6.

Rationing was part of APNIC’s “Final /8” plan to deal with IPv4 exhaustion, which many Australian operators had already accounted for by stockpiling IPv4 addresses. Optus recently told iTNews that it had a reserve for business continuity purposes.

The allocation that finished off APNIC's dwindling pool occurred this week, after it issued nearly 500,000 IPv4 addresses to the Chinanet Fujian Province Network, according to Davidson.   

There were signs earlier this month that IPv4's D-Day was near after APNIC knocked back Microsoft's request for temporary addresses to support its annual TechEd conference. 

"There is no IPv4 address space available for temporary allocation," APNIC told Microsoft.

In it's way, this is another argument against a too rigid central planning function.  Markets don't always expand the way Central Planners think the will or should.  The millions, the hundreds of millions of consumers sometimes want to go a different way, and that should be their right.

Regards  —  Cliff