alt Hacker NewsIndia: 47M
China: 358M
Both countries have roughly the same population. The IPv4 problem has been swept under the rug with CGNAT and a normal person doesn't even notice it. But it sucks. Forget having a dedicated IP, even on a broadband connection, you don't get a public IP that's truly yours. According to IPInfo[1], there are around 1,000 users sharing my IP. I get flagged for malicious activity, and online gaming is impossible without a Tailscale relay.
Of course, much of this comes down to the bad luck (+ policies) of developing late, when most IPv4 blocks had already been allocated. But it's pretty unfair how US DoD, Apple, Ford, and others [1] are sitting on enormous IPv4 blocks they'll probably never fully use, and may never sell. Meanwhile I am sharing a single public IP with a thousand strangers.
[1]: https://ipinfo.io/223.233.77.184
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...
Replies
> But it's pretty unfair how US DoD, Apple, Ford, and others [1] are sitting on enormous IPv4 blocks
Maybe Apple and Ford, but it's more than fair that DoD has large blocks since they created ipv4 to connect themselves to other networks. It was only 10 years ago that the US government decided to give up control of IANA.
My take is that the solution here isn't "give India more IPv4 addresses", it's "force more Americans onto CGNAT", so that it becomes untenable for service providers to treat IPv4 addresses as if they're tied to a single user, and to encourage people to use IPv6.
s/IP/IPv4/g
Configuring my OS to prefer IPv6 addresses of DNS responses significantly reduced the number of web captchas I see (on NAT444 with native IPv6).
IPv4 is old and broken, use IPv6.
The Chinese are having a big push for IPv6 adoption, and, being China, this is likely to actually happen as ISPs follow government orders. But also being China, they are also pushing for 'enhancements' for IPv6 for the usual reasons, which the rest of the world is unlikely to be willing to adopt.[1]
[1] https://www.theregister.com/networks/2026/07/22/china-advanc...
What I really don't understand is IPv6 has been around... decades now... why the heck havent we started forcing it more and more?
A lot of the original /8 holders have sold off chunks to AWS and other cloud providers.
Wow I didn’t know CGNAT was a thing for home users.
Bell in Canada continues to offer only IPv4 on their fibre network. I fully expect for them to somehow crap up the transition to IPv6 by putting up CGNAT because fuck you, customer.
> "India: 47M
> "China: 358M
> "Both countries have roughly the same population"
To save anyone else curious from looking it up - their populations are about 1.4 billion (1400 million) each.
China mandates IPv6. So does the US, but the US drags their feet. Meanwhile in Europe it's near universal even though not mandated and no v4 shortage.
Most people don't care about a private IP, which is why they cost about $20-$25 each (which would be about $2 a year to finance). I've used Airtel in the past and they certainly offer a dedicated IP. Currently I'm with TATA and Vodafone in India
Indeed a shared IP is arguably a benefit in that it makes fingerprinting harder.
If your ISP had customers who were interested it could spend $150k on a /19 block giving 8000 IPv4 addresses and charge an extra ₹100 a month for them and after two years it would be in profit.
In fact I think Jio and Airtel offer static IPs for residential use for something like ₹300 a month, which given how cheap IPv4 addresses are is a massive money spinner, but I have't spoken to anyone living in India about ISPs for a couple of years.
End users do notice CGNAT when their internet voice/video calls keep dropping for no apparent reason.
CGNAT is awesome, you cant IP ban me anymore and I dont need a VPN turned on for silly things, and I can control fingerprinting (mostly), CGNAT is great for anonymity. If I want a static it cost me ~10.00 a month, im fine with that.
i purchased a dedicated ipv4 from my isp.
an ipv4 for every man woman and child!
Yep. And, insult to injury, the /4's and /8's of little-unused IPv4 special-use addresses - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipv4#Special-use_addresses
"swept under the rug with CGNAT" is a really funny way to say "solved by IPv6"
what is the meaning (or units) of your first numbers?
Diamonds and IPv4 share a common trait.
Lab-grown diamonds found a strong role as industrial components, which expanded overall demand for diamond materials and widened their use cases. IPv6 may follow a similar path, with adoption concentrated in newer and novel applications where IPv4 addresses were scarce.
IPv4 seems likely to remain in place for many existing applications, much like natural diamonds in jewelry, regardless of policy/advocacy views.
PSA that if you have a ham radio licence, anywhere in the world, there are IPv4 addresses available for you for the taking at ARDC (AMPR)[1].
You can either get a block of /24 to announce yourself (you've got to cover all the technical setup and costs of this) or use their free 44net.connect service and just organise a wireguard tunnel.
You cannot use it for anything commercial.
[1] https://wiki.ampr.org/wiki/Main_Page