Antarctica frozen out of internet revolution

IP Density

"Bringing up the rear are the luddites of Antarctica, with a pathetic 15,620 IP addresses, 0.001 per cent of the world total."

Sure thats a minute fraction of the global allocation, but according to "http://www.indexmundi.com/antarctica/population.html", Antarctica has a "peak summer population" of "3,822 total" which means that there are more than 4 IP addresses assigned for every man and woman on the continent! Not all that suprising though when you consider the place is populated solely by techie scientists...

re: Anyone know who the ISP is down there?

Uh, that would probably be www.brassmonkeys.co.aq...

15,620 - that's more than the population

Perhaps indeed the seals and penguins own all those addresses.

Did they forget?

What about Ipv6? Did the researchers forget to check the rate-of-adoption in Asia vs. the US/EU? What picture does that paint?

Ariel Silverstone

I was an Antarctic sysadmin...

Until (very) recently, I was the sysadmin/communications engineer at one of the British bases. Permanent internet connectivity (via satellite) has only been installed in the last few years. The base I worked at had a total bandwidth of 384kbit/s full duplex, shared between up to 120 staff using PCs and an IP phone system. But as the bases are behind a NAT firewall at our HQ in the UK, we wouldn´t have appeared in this survey...

Oh, and I can confirm Sean´s point that as all bases have a large number of datalogging computers and servers, the number of networked machines is often significantly greater than the number of staff.

Ya gotta know how to read the figures

Of course the United States would dominate the rest of the world as far as the number of IP addresses. And of course, less empowered areas such as Africa would be dragging up the rear.

What should be noted, however, is that lowly Antarctica, which has but 15,000 or so IP addresses probably has but one quarter that number of actual residents.

If you work out the number of IP addresses per resident, Antarctica should rank up there near the top right after the USA and Europe. And let's not foget that getting the internet down there is a bit more difficult than just having your local cable or phone company hook you up.

Atlanteans

Naw. It's those pesky Atlanteans from their hidden base somewhere in the depths of Antartica trying to spam the world with requests like "Flood relief for Atlantis !". Sure as hell sounds better than the 419 spams !!