SleepyEgg

As the remaining pool of IPv4 addresses dwindles (only 623 million are left!), it turns out that the remaining address space isn't exactly beachfront property. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) currently has 16 blocks of 16.8 million IPv4 addresses left—out of a total of 221 usable such blocks. In January, IANA gave the 1.0.0.0/8 block (all IP addresses starting with "1") to APNIC, the Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre in Brisbane, Australia, which distributes IP addresses in Asia (excluding the former USSR) and Oceania. It turns out that this block is attracting no less than 150Mbps worth of assorted traffic before getting put into use.

In a talk at the North American Network Operators Group's 49th meeting in San Francisco earlier this week, research into the seedy back alleys of "1slash8" was presented by six researchers from Merit, APNIC, and the University of Michigan. Merit, a nonprofit that runs the networks linking public universities in Michigan, "announced" the whole 1.0.0.0 block (packets aimed at addresses in this range from all corners of the Internet were forwarded to Merit) during the last week of February. This amounted to 130-150Mbps worth of traffic. For comparison, Merit also announced the 35.0.0.0/8 block, which only attracted 15-25Mbps of traffic. Also, the vast majority of the block 1 traffic was UDP, while most of the block 35 traffic was TCP.