59Box - China Hosting Blog

IPs in China

March 4th, 2007

IP here is not Intellectual Property, yet another hot topic in China, but Internet Protocol, as in IP address.

Here’s an interesting visualization of IP allocation per capita (via Ip Assignment, Per Capita).

The colors indicate 1 IP is available for how many people in the country.

Notice that China, among most other countries have less than 1 IP per capita. (Exact value is not provided, interested to work that out?)

If the rate of Internet growth in China holds true, China may be running out of IP soon. Or is it?

My interest in this was aroused recently I enquired about getting more IP addresses to provide VPS service. To my horror I was told that IP is assigned 1 per rack space and would cost almost as much as a co-location to get another. Checking with a few more providers gives basically the same answer. The reason? “IP demand is very ???” (interesting term here, how do you translate it succinctly?)

According to 2006 IPv4 Address Use Report (somewhere near the bottom), China distributed 98.02M addresses compared to US 1366.53M. This information, if put together with another data - China’s 137M Internet users, second behind US’s 207M users but with only 10% penetration - does make the IP shortage scenario look very real.

But Andy Oram presented the other side of the argument - there isn’t an IP address crunch. In fact, Asia-Pacific used up only 13.9% of the IP allocated. This is much inline with the rest of the world.

So what is the true picture of IP allocation in China? This article and this APNIC article may enlighten.

But my question still remains - how to get more IP? Is anyone able to introduce me into a guanxi circle to get a block of IPs?

Entry Filed under: Hosting in China