GENEVA - The claims that internet IP addresses are running out worldwide are not true, and resources allocated to some regional internet registries are far from exhausted, said a senior official of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in a recent interview.

The in-use IP addresses still have potentials that can be tapped, not to mention that a great number of allocated IP addresses are currently not in use, said Zhao Houlin, Deputy Secretary General of the Geneva-based organization.

He noted that internet, which originated in American laboratories in the 1970s, was later taken over by the U.S. military and transferred to civilian uses worldwide. Over the past decade and more it developed rapidly worldwide and has entered into all areas of life.

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However, the recent media reports that the internet IP addresses worldwide are running out have raised concerns among many people, he said.

He said this was caused by the recent announcement of an organization responsible for the global allocation of IP addresses. According to the organization, all open resources have been allocated to the five continents and no more IP address have been left.

However, Zhao said, a closer look will reveal that the so-called  "exhaustion" means only that the resources under the organization's control have been allocated to the continents, but the regional registries have not allocated all of their respective resources.

Zhao also said there are still potentials for the in-use IP addresses.  The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has given only some 300 million IP addresses to China, accounting for less than 10 percent of the global total, while China boasts over 400 million internet users, far more than its given shares of IP addresses.

By contrast, the United States with a population of only 300 million,  has almost 40 percent of the global IP addresses, a large part of which have remained idle up to now, he added.

The ITU deputy secretary general said there are still potentials in the unused regional resources of the current IP address system.

But he cautioned that the use of un-opened IP addresses required the solutions of many technical, operational and security problems.

On the success of telephone services worldwide over the past 100 years, Zhao said, one important reason is that each user has an unique number.

The entire telephone numbering system is unified under ITU which assigns national codes to every country, and it's up to individual countries to develop their own user numbers.

At present, the total number of mobile users has surpassed 5 billion and the total number of fixed phones has exceeded 1 billion worldwide.

So far there have not been any major problems with telephone numbers,which are growing rather than running out, said Zhao.

When experts started working on IPv4 at the American labs, he said, the number of over 4.2 billion IP addresses was considered astronomical.

The distribution and management of the internet IP addresses was decided by experts in the American labs at that time, not with a globally unified approach, he said.

This should be blamed for the current exhaustion problem, he added.

The problem of IP address exhaustion already raised an alarm among experts more than 10 years ago, Zhao said. Many believed that under the current system the IP addresses would be exhausted and some solutions are needed.

Currently efforts are being made to develop IPv6 to increase the capacity of IP addresses from the present 32th power of 2 to 218 power of 2, another astronomical figure.

Zhao affirmed that the switch to IPv6 was indeed necessary. However, the transfer of billions of the present users to the new system will certainly encounter many new problems, such as investment, construction, application and transition.

The new global or national networks should be developed on the present basis, instead of building a a brand new system, he said.

IPv6 made its debut over 10 years ago and now it is still in experimental stage, Zhao said, China has made great strides in this area and has begun test use of IPv6.

Asked when will the internet users switch from IPv4 to IPv6, Zhao said this switch needs time, similar to the switch of China's mobile telephone from the second generation GSM to the third generation 3G.

Despite the enormous IP address capacity from the new system IPv6, Zhao emphasized, the system will sooner or later encounter the same problem of address exhaustion, if it follows the same path of address distribution as IPv4.

There are also other problems, such as the effective planning and development of national networks, network security and rational distribution of resources.

Zhao called for the establishment of an authoritative global mechanism which would discuss how to distribute IP addresses in a fairer, more just and more transparent way.

He proposed to take the "two-track" approach: i.e. allowing the market to control part of the resources, or the IPv4 model; and allocating another part of the addresses directly to the states which will formulate their own plans for development.

However, the repetition of mistakes under IPv4 must be avoided, he added.

The ITU is also concerned with internet management, endeavoring to find an appropriate solution. At a meeting in Mexico in October 2010, member states expressed the hope that ITU should continue to play a role in this area, he said.