So the quoted metric may well be true, but as unhelpful as claiming that "MIT has more address space than the whole of China" (as some people do from time to time).
Which is complete nonsense. MIT has 18/8, which is a little under 17 million addresses. I'm assuming that whatever else on top of that they have doesn't amount to a significant number. China is eating up IPv4 address space like it's going out of style (hm...) and they're now the third largest holder with 140 million IPv4 addresses, a hair shy of Japan's 142 million and 1/10th of the US's 1411 million.
Total delegations: 1624, millions of addresses: 48.55.
If one were to sum this up briefly, would it be correct to answer the MIT myth by saying: MIT has only 17 million addresses but China has 140 million. Along with Japan at 142 million, these are the top two holders of IP addresses with the USA trailing at 48.5 million. Due to legacy allocations which are often used wastefully due to legacy technology, the USA is often quoted as having 1,411 million IP addresses but this does not reflect the current rules under which IP address registries operate. In addition, since we are likely to use up all possible IPv4 addresses by 2011, smart organizations are moving to IPv6 where there is no shortage forecast for 100 years or more. Personally, I would like to see the NRO take a crack at issuing some kind of statement like this, to make it clear where the IP addresses are used, why organizations like MIT are not villains, and why the only way out of the steadily tightening straitjacket is to shift new network growth onto IPv6 and get to work on sorting out all the minor technical issues that will only get sorted out by actually pushing ahead with deployment, and use of IPv6. Back in the early days of the Internet, it was easier because there was a smaller community of vendors, network operators and protocol developers. Also, people didn't fully understand the implications of deploying the Internet as a replacement for all other networks in existence, therefore they forged ahead blissfully unaware that they were about to stumble head on into a technical problem. The result, is that there was constant movement, constant bug fixing, and all the minor technical issues faded into distant memories. All we have to do to make IPv6 ready for primetime is to deploy it for real, find the issues, fix the issues and move on. There is a real opportunity here for smaller companies who know how to run a lean mean operation, to deploy IPv6 Internet services at half the price of the large companies, and come out on top in three years or so when the large companies buy them out for big sums of money. The price incentive will ensure a steady stream of customers who are willing to take the chance with a less-than-perfect best-effort service. --Michael Dillon --Michael Dillon