VietNamNet Bridge – CMC Telecoms and FPT Telecoms have complained about the lack of available IPv4 addresses, so they cannot attract new subscribers, saying that the reserved addresses do not relate to current growth and the broadband market share.

The two companies, which hold 15.87 per cent and 0.96 per cent of shares in the broadband market, have only 1.4 million and 41,000 IPv4 addresses reserved, or 9 per cent and 0.27 per cent of all the addresses allocated to Viet Nam.

A senior executive at CMC Telecom said that the firm expects to have an extra 90,000 Internet subscribers by the end of 2013. He said that if development of the IPv6 continues to go slow, the growth in new subscribers to CMC TI will fall by 50 per cent.

Meanwhile, FPT Telecoms said that the modest number of IPv4 addresses left would make it difficult for the firm to attract new subscribers, but it would still manage, while it tries to get IPv6 for new subscribers.

However, director of the Viet Nam Internet Centre (VNNIC) Hoang Minh Cuong said that as both CMC and FPT did not realise the importance of the issue, they did not fully prepare to develop their networks.

He said that running out of addresses had been foreseeable, as the VNNIC had asked Internet service providers (ISP) to give them an idea of how many addresses they needed to hold in store for their networks and customer development during the transitional period into comprehensive use of IPv6.

However, only VNPT, Viettel and SPT asked for large numbers of IPv4 addresses to be reserved, hanging on to roughly spare 15.5 million addresses.

VNPT, for example, with 48.63 per cent of the broadband market share, has reserved over 7.7 million IPv4 addresses, or 49 per cent of the total addresses allocated to Viet Nam.

Viettel, with 32.25 per cent of the market share has reserved 5.4 million IPv4, or 35 per cent of all total addresses.

Tran Minh Tan, Deputy Director of VNNIC, said that the rapid development of smart devices including tablets, smart phones and the higher demand has led to a faster consumption of IP addresses and puts Viet Nam dangerously close to running out of IPv4 altogether, even though the number of IPv4 addresses granted to Viet Nam was initially very big.

Tan thinks that the lack of a long term vision by telecom companies has put them in a dilemma. CMC Telecom has admitted that it could not imagine more development or a higher demand in the near future.

IPv4 addresses were profuse prior to 2010, but firms did not think they would ever need to ask for huge numbers of addresses, thinking that 40,000 would be enough.

Asia Pacific became the first region in the world to exhaust its supply of IPv4 addresses, on April 15, 2011.

The Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) is the fourth version in the development of the Internet Protocol (IP) and the first version of the protocol to be widely deployed.

It is one of the core protocols of standards, based on internet working methods and routes most of the traffic on the Internet.

Source: VNS