Interview: Internet IP addresses not exhausted: ITU official

• Source: Xinhua
• [08:47 February 14 2011]
• Comments

The claims that internet IP addresses are running out worldwide are not true, and resources allocated to some regional internet registries are far from exhausted, said a senior official of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in a recent interview with Xinhua.

The in-use IP addresses still have potentials that can be tapped, not to mention that a great number of allocated IP addresses are currently not in use, said Zhao Houlin, Deputy Secretary General of the Geneva-based organization.

He noted that internet, which originated in American laboratories in the 1970s, was later taken over by the U.S. military and transferred to civilian uses worldwide. Over the past decade and more it developed rapidly worldwide and has entered into all areas of life.

However, the recent media reports that the internet IP addresses worldwide are running out have raised concerns among many people, he said.

He said this was caused by the recent announcement of an organization responsible for the global allocation of IP addresses. According to the organization, all open resources have been allocated to the five continents and no more IP address have been left.

However, Zhao said, a closer look will reveal that the so-called "exhaustion" means only that the resources under the organization's control have been allocated to the continents, but the regional registries have not allocated all of their respective resources.

Zhao also said there are still potentials for the in-use IP addresses. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has given only some 300 million IP addresses to China, accounting for less than 10 percent of the global total, while China boasts over 400 million internet users, far more than its given shares of IP addresses.

By contrast, the United States with a population of only 300 million, has almost 40 percent of the global IP addresses, a large part of which have remained idle up to now, he added.

The ITU deputy secretary general said there are still potentials in the unused regional resources of the current IP address system.

But he cautioned that the use of un-opened IP addresses required the solutions of many technical, operational and security problems.

On the success of telephone services worldwide over the past 100 years, Zhao said, one important reason is that each user has an unique number.

The entire telephone numbering system is unified under ITU which assigns national codes to every country, and it's up to individual countries to develop their own user numbers.

At present, the total number of mobile users has surpassed 5 billion and the total number of fixed phones has exceeded 1 billion worldwide.

So far there have not been any major problems with telephone numbers,which are growing rather than running out, said Zhao.

When experts started working on IPv4 at the American labs, he said, the number of over 4.2 billion IP addresses was considered astronomical.

The distribution and management of the internet IP addresses was decided by experts in the American labs at that time, not with a globally unified approach, he said.

This should be blamed for the current exhaustion problem, he added.