Internet IP addresses not exhausted: ITU official

New Delhi, Feb 14 (ANI): An ITU official has denied that Internet addresses running out worldwide.

Zhao Houlin, a senior official of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), said that the IP address stock is not declining and resources allocated to some regional internet registries are far from exhausted.

The in-use IP addresses still have potentials that can be tapped, not to mention that a great number of allocated IP addresses are currently not in use, said Houlin, Deputy Secretary General of the Geneva-based organization.

Houlin said the so-called "exhaustion" means only that the resources under the organization's control have been allocated to the continents, but the regional registries have not allocated all of their respective resources, reports English.news.cn.

He also said there are still potentials for the in-use IP addresses.

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has given only some 300 million IP addresses to China, accounting for less than 10 percent of the global total, while China boasts over 400 million internet users, far more than its given shares of IP addresses.

By contrast, the United States with a population of only 300 million, has almost 40 percent of the global IP addresses, a large part of which have remained idle up to now, he added.

However, he warned that the use of un-opened IP addresses required the solutions of many technical, operational and security problems.

The reason for the current exhaustion is that the distribution and management of the internet IP addresses was decided by experts in the American labs at that time, not with a globally unified approach, he said.

Houlin confirmed that the switch to IPv6 was indeed necessary.

Asked when will the internet users switch from IPv4 to IPv6, he said this switch needs time, similar to the switch of China's mobile telephone from the second generation GSM to the third generation 3G.

However, the repetition of mistakes under IPv4 must be avoided, he added. (ANI)