About a year and a half ago I was working on writing a book that forced me to learn that about 16-17% of the Earth’s population had Internet access.  This is a stunningly low percentage of people.  I laugh at myself whenever I get grumpy for not having connectivity every single place I go.  My sense of entitlement to net access is pretty …American?  Regardless, I expect it.  I have to force myself to feel privileged for being in the incredibly small percentage that does have connectivity pretty much everywhere (thank you, mobile phone).

This morning I decided to see how the planet was coming along.  Wow.  What a bump.  According to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm a little under 22% of the population is now connected.  That shakes out to about 1.46 billion people.  The number of connected people seems to be growing at about 4% per year.  That’s impressive by itself but even more impressive when you consider the fact that the earth’s population is increasing at an insane rate at the same time.

IPv6 was designed with the year 2050 in mind; a time when we expect there to be somewhere around 10 billion people puttering around.  Even with 100% penetration (e.g. everybody on Earth has Internet connectivity) there are still more than enough IP addresses to go around.  And around.  And around.  In fact, with a population of 10 billion thera are 2 billion /48 networks per person.  Each /48 network has 65,536 possible subnets.  Each subnet has 18.4 quintillion possible addresses.  So that’s (2,000,000,000*65,536)*18.4 quintillion addresses per person.  We should be good.