How big is the
Internet? There's a variety of numbers that are given, since actually
measuring the size of the Internet is difficult, given the amount of
NAT and
firewalls that go on. But rather than give excuses, here are a couple sources, as of today (August 30, 2001).
Netsizer (netsizer.com) claims the number of hosts is around 117 million. This is based of domain name servers.
Matrix.net estimates the number of hosts at 105 million.
Based on ISP data, the ISPs have a total of about 470 million subscribers.
The current routing table has 104,469 announced CIDR blocks, representing 1,226,659,994 IP addresses (out of about 4 billion).
Approximately 1,281,798,746 IP addresses have been assigned by ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, or AUNIC.
Regardless, however, of how you measure it, the Internet is big, and it's a credit to the original designers that it continues to work as well as it has, with only minor modifications.