Redraw the world by IPv4 addresses and a thread argues about India's 47 million

What the cartogram measures

IP Trust's cartogram redraws each country so its area equals (its IPv4 addresses ÷ world IPv4 addresses) × world land area. The base is about 135 million km² of land outside Antarctica and 3.6 billion locatable addresses from the IP Trust geolocation database (October 2026). Countries are coloured by whether they grow four times or more, shrink to a quarter or less, or stay roughly even; about 70 small territories holding around 52 million addresses are left out.

The numbers behind the map, from one commenter's NAT

The thread skipped the cartogram and went to what scarcity means for people. One reader listed India at 47M addresses and China at 358M:

"Both countries have roughly the same population." — a commenter who says about 1,000 users share their IP

He added that carrier-grade NAT hides the shortage for ordinary users but gets him flagged for malicious activity, and makes online gaming impossible without a relay.

"Just add more bits" meets the packet header

The most replied-to idea was to extend IPv4 with a prefix so old addresses become a subnet of a bigger space. The rebuttal was concrete:

"Existing IPv4 hardware and software expects addresses to be 4 bytes long. They expect packets to have a 4 byte source address at offset 12 in the header, then a 4 byte destination address at offset 16." — mort96, who replied with the header layout

Another commenter noted the plan still amounts to a new protocol that every router and client must learn, which is IPv6's core adoption problem (a reply on the translation layer). The cartogram's real use is showing which regions are on the wrong side of that bottleneck before any such protocol exists.