There has been doom and gloom about the lack of IPv4 addresses for years, but China’s flabbergasting internet growth has made the problem acute. Addresses assigned to China are running out as more servers go live and commercial and home internet connectivity rapidly increases. The (unidentified) rate of growth doesn’t even address what I think will be the next connectivity boom in China: mobile devices.

As tempting as it is may be to declare this the end times and hole up in some digital Decameron, the IP apocalypse really isn’t upon us. ISPs can fiddle around with network address translation (NAT) to support internet access (although it would be problematic for serving internet content). This would slow, but not stop, address allocation.

Checked today, it is fading very fast…so you better go to Catching Mice and find out why the Chinese internet is disappearing…