Why would a company/school want to own 16 million IPs?

[Mandm723]

I have seen that Stanford sold some of their 16 million IPv4 addresses, what exactly does IPv4 mean and how do they own the IPs? What does it let them do? I have also heard that Apple owns a ton of IPs.

 

Sorry I'm a noob.

 

Thanks!

[mariushm]

With IPv4, each computer that connects to the Internet needs a unique IP address, which is a combination of 4 numbers with values between 0 and 255 for each number. Basically, 32 bits or 4 bytes.

Think of the IP address as a unique code that's like a mix of postal code, street name and house number, it makes it possible for computers around the world direct data packets from various place towards your computer and the other way around.

When Internet was started, the people that made it didn't think it would become so popular, they were thinking that at best they'd be able to connect a few mainframe computers in various big companies and universities - back then a computer used to cost tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars and was big like a closet.

So whenever some company wanted to go on the internet, they gave them a big chunk of those addresses, so that each computer in their organization could connect to the Internet directly.

Only a few years later, there were some schemes invented that would allow several computers to hide behind a single IP address (sort of like what your router does, or what a network switch)

 

Being a 32bit number, the maximum number of addresses is limited to 2³² or about 4.3 billion unique numbers, but for efficiency reasons whenever some IPs are assigned to some organization, it's usually done in minimum chunks of 256 addresses... so lots of companies have such chunks of addresses but they only use one or several addresses and the others stay unused.

 

IPv6 is a new format of addresses which basically has a maximum number so big that if every person in the world now would receive a few million unique addresses, there would still be a huge number of addresses unused.

However, being so new, a lot of things don't support this new scheme, so you need  one of these older IPv4 addresses as a fallback

[suchamoneypit]

IPv4 is Internet Protocol Version 4. In order for devices to communicate they need an address. Your router that your PC communicates with is using an IP address to communicate with LTT Forums servers. Just like how a mailing service knows to deliver mail to you by your physical address, IPs work the same way to communicate with other PCs. IPv4 has 4 octets, with 8 bits in each. 

00000000.00000000.00000000.00000000. 

 

These bits "activate" to give a value, each bit has a certain value, in this order: 

 

128 | 64 | 32 | 16 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 1

 

These numbers together equal 255. For example,

11000000 equals 192 (128 +64).

 

And example IPv4 IP of 192.168.1.1 in binary is 11000000 10101000 00000001 00000001

 

The internet originally was based on IPv4, but due to only have these 8 bit octets, 4 total, meaning 32 bits per address, we are limited to a maximum total of  4,294,967,296 addresses which we have run out of. Because of this the IPv4 addresses are valuable. We have managed to keep going using some other protocols that without deep network explanation "give us more addresses". For example when you talk to LTT servers, all the devices on your network have "internal" IPs, but when you go to talk to LTT servers you go to your router, which has a real IPv4 "external" address and it forwards the message to LTT servers, and when LTT talks back, it sends its message to your router, which then forwards it to your PC. Almost like a group spokesperson you have to go through to talk.

 

We have since moved to IPv6 and are currently transitioning. IPv6 is a 128 bit address (32 bit octets) and supports a total of 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses. 

[Orangeator]

2 minutes ago, suchamoneypit said:

We have since moved to IPv6 and are currently tranisitioning. IPv6 is a 128 bit address and supports a total of 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses. 

That is a lot of numbers, how would you pronounce it? Like what is that in word form lol.

[suchamoneypit]

3 minutes ago, Orangeator said:

That is a lot of numbers, how would you pronounce it? Like what is that in word form lol.

They certainly didn't want to run into the whole running out of internet addresses the second time around haha. I don't know if it has a pronounceable version.

 

A note, every single internet connected device has an IP, printers, phones, tablets, PCs, servers, ect; so you can imagine how a 32-bit IPv6 with a limit of 4.3 billion addresses quickly ran out of addresses. Just think of how many devices you've personally used in the last 24 hours that have their own address.

[mariushm]

here's quoting from wikipedia

 

Quote

The 128 bits of an IPv6 address are represented in 8 groups of 16 bits each. Each group is written as four hexadecimal digits and the groups are separated by colons (:). An example of this representation is 2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:ff00:0042:8329.

For convenience, an IPv6 address may be abbreviated to shorter notations by application of the following rules.

• One or more leading zeroes from any groups of hexadecimal digits are removed; this is usually done to either all or none of the leading zeroes. For example, the group 0042 is converted to 42.
• Consecutive sections of zeroes are replaced with a double colon (::). The double colon may only be used once in an address, as multiple use would render the address indeterminate. RFC 5952 recommends that a double colon must not be used to denote an omitted single section of zeroes.^[38]

An example of application of these rules:

Initial address: 2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:ff00:0042:8329

After removing all leading zeroes in each group: 2001:db8:0:0:0:ff00:42:8329

After omitting consecutive sections of zeroes: 2001:db8::ff00:42:8329

 

But to keep it even simpler, you don't.

You have now DNS servers, so you can buy a domain for all your network , and create a subdomain for each IP address you use.

So if you want to access your printer, you could just say printer_basement.orangeator.tld  (where tld can be any suffix you want, com net org etc)

[Orangeator]

25 minutes ago, suchamoneypit said:

They certainly didn't want to run into the whole running out of internet addresses the second time around haha. I don't know if it has a pronounceable version.

 

A note, every single internet connected device has an IP, printers, phones, tablets, PCs, servers, ect; so you can imagine how a 32-bit IPv6 with a limit of 4.3 billion addresses quickly ran out of addresses. Just think of how many devices you've personally used in the last 24 hours that have their own address.

"three hundred forty undecillion, two hundred eighty-two decillion, three hundred sixty-six nonillion, nine hundred twenty octillion, nine hundred thirty-eight septillion, four hundred sixty-three sextillion, four hundred sixty-three quintillion, three hundred seventy-four quadrillion, six hundred seven trillion, four hundred thirty-one billion, seven hundred sixty-eight million, two hundred eleven thousand, four hundred fifty-six" Just to let you know I put it in a number to word converter. Lol, that is how one would pronounce such a number hahaha.

[SCHISCHKA]

57 minutes ago, Mandm723 said:

I have seen that Stanford sold some of their 16 million IPv4 addresses, what exactly does IPv4 mean and how do they own the IPs? What does it let them do? I have also heard that Apple owns a ton of IPs.

 

Sorry I'm a noob.

 

Thanks!

 

Stanford has so many because in the early days it was mostly universities, banks and government that had computers. Early adopters were given generous IP ranges. IP4 is just your computers digital address. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4

[leadeater]

They don't want those huge ranges, they were assigned to them back in the 80s and 90s. What makes it hard is it's not just a simple matter of chopping them up or giving them back and not just from the current internet regulations and standards point of view either. Those ranges were often very poorly utilized and thought out so there isn't large contiguous blocks of unused IP addresses since in the early days of IPv4 the less is best principle was not a thing so subnets were huge.

 

So the owners of those massive ranges have to go through a rather large effort of readdressing large segments of their network, change their routing tables and advertisements etc. It's worth the effort now though as you can make significant amount of money from IPv4 address space.

[risk]

It's also interesting to compare:

 

Amazon/AS16509 has 15M v4 addresses, 1900 announcements

Apple/AS714 has 16M v4 addresses, 679 announcements

Google/AS15169 has 2.6M v4 addresses, 404 announcements

Facebook/AS32934 has 90k v4 addresses, 70 announcements

Microsoft/AS8075 has 21M v4 addresses, 234 announcements

 

other than Apple with a /8 .. Microsoft has some /11s and the rest have smaller blocks.