If you want a peek into the underbelly of the beast (that is Yahoo!BB/Softbank), check out James Seng’s blog where he links to the fact that Softbank has recently been allocated a Class A IP address. In other words, they now have 16 million more IPv4 addresses to sell to their customers.
Yahoo! BB got 16M IP address
That’s 1/16 of all the IPv4 address space available to APNIC in the first place! And to paraphrase Mark Twain, there isn’t any more being created…
http://www.apnic.net/db/ranges.html
Given how much China complains about its own allocation (there will be 134 million Internet users in China by the end of the year), this will clearly be seen as a sign of favoritism towards a Japanese company. I certainly hope they had good justification for such a massive allocation. Unless every Yahoo BB customer gets a static IP address, it does seem profligate.
For comparison’s sake, I tallied the allocations for the top 10 Asia-Pacific Internet nations, in millions of IP addresses:
JP 103.5
CN 61.6
KR 34.3
AU 25.3
TW 14.9
HK 6.0
IN 5.3
NZ 4.2
SG 2.5
TH 2.4
Also interesting is to see who got the class A networks when they were first handed out, and when:
http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space
In some cases, there was much acrimony: Jon Postel essentially ran the Internet until his death in 1998, was accused of favoritism when @Home was granted a class A in 1997 (Paul Mockapetris of @Home was a good friend of Postel).