NATting a whole country?

Wed Jan 3 23:53:23 UTC 2007

On 4-jan-2007, at 0:31, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:

> According to
> http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-TechBit-Wikipedia- 
> Block.html
> all of Qatar appears on the net as a single IP address.

I wonder what they use the other 241663 addresses for.

+---------+---------+------+--------------+--------+
| rir     | country | type | descr        | num    |
+---------+---------+------+--------------+--------+
| ripencc | QA      | ipv4 | 81.29.160.0  |   4096 |
| ripencc | QA      | ipv4 | 82.148.96.0  |   8192 |
| ripencc | QA      | ipv4 | 86.36.0.0    | 131072 |
| ripencc | QA      | ipv4 | 86.62.192.0  |  16384 |
| ripencc | QA      | ipv4 | 89.211.0.0   |  65536 |
| ripencc | QA      | ipv4 | 212.77.192.0 |   8192 |
| ripencc | QA      | ipv4 | 213.130.96.0 |   8192 |
| ripencc | QA      | ipv6 | 2001:1a10::  |     32 |
+---------+---------+------+--------------+--------+

They have 0.4 addresses per person in Qatar, which isn't all that  
bad: Italy has 0.33. (Caveats about EU labeled address space etc apply.)