It sounds like a question with one answer. Query our own records for every address block tagged to Australia and add them up, and you get 1.12 billion addresses: a quarter of the entire IPv4 space, for a country of 27 million people. That number is wrong, and the way it is wrong is the real story.
The single largest block behind that 1.12 billion figure is 46 sets of 16.7 million addresses each, tagged to Australia because that is where the office that keeps the paperwork happens to sit. It is not a real network. It is unallocated address space still parked in administrative limbo. Once you remove that and a handful of similar leftover records, 95% of the raw total disappears before you have looked at a single working Australian network.
So we went looking for a better answer using the part of our data that actually watches the internet rather than reading its paperwork: our own address location data, built from routing, network behaviour, and direct measurement rather than registration records alone.
What our own location data shows
Every IPv4 address we place inside Australia also gets placed inside a state or territory, and usually a city. Add those up today and the picture is heavily lopsided toward two states.
New South Wales alone accounts for a bit more than half of every Australian IPv4 address we can place, and New South Wales plus Victoria together make up three in every four. That lines up with where people actually live: Sydney and Melbourne are Australia’s two largest cities by a wide margin, and address space still tracks population far more closely than it tracks land area. Western Australia covers about a third of the continent and holds barely one address in sixteen.
| City | State | Share of national total |
|---|---|---|
| Sydney | New South Wales | 52.0% |
| Melbourne | Victoria | 19.8% |
| Brisbane | Queensland | 7.7% |
| Perth | Western Australia | 5.7% |
| Adelaide | South Australia | 4.0% |
| Canberra | Australian Capital Territory | 2.3% |
| Hobart | Tasmania | 0.7% |
| Newcastle | New South Wales | 0.5% |
Sydney on its own holds more address space than every state except New South Wales and Victoria combined.
Four different answers to the same question
The raw total from the opening of this piece sits at one extreme. Here is where the more careful counts land.
What’s actually running, over six years
Our address location data goes back daily to 2020. Sampling it once a year gives a trend line for what has actually been placed in Australia, separate from anyone’s registration paperwork.
The measured total fell by roughly 9 million addresses between 2020 and 2022, most likely addresses that had been placed in Australia by inference and were later corrected once better signal arrived, then found a floor. For the last four years it has not moved by more than 2 million addresses in either direction. It also sits a steady 25% above the formal allocation count, the whole time. Both things are true together: the measured number is more stable than the paperwork’s own churn would suggest, and it is measuring something the paperwork does not capture at all.
Does the paperwork match where things actually run
A registration record says where a network is registered. That is an administrative fact, not a physical one, in the same way a company’s country of incorporation does not tell you where its staff sit. We checked the two against each other directly: for every Australian-registered address block, we measured round-trip time from a global network of vantage points to work out which parts of the world it could physically be in.
Almost 95% of Australian-registered address space measures out right where it says it is. What is left splits into shades of wrong, mostly cases where the operating company still lines up even if the formal registration technically does not, down to a genuinely tiny remainder, 0.14%, that measures nowhere near its registration at all.
Who’s actually announcing it
A related but different question: setting registration aside, which country’s networks actually carry Australian-registered traffic. Global routing data answers this directly, since every address block’s announcing network has its own country of record, independent of what the underlying block’s registration says. A handful of very large blocks are still filed under a records office rather than any real operator; we set those aside first, or the comparison would quietly overcount whichever country that office happens to sit in.
A little over nine in ten addresses are announced by an Australian network, which is the shape you would expect for a country with a domestic internet provider market this size. Almost all of the remainder is a modest United States presence, mostly cloud infrastructure, and everything else scatters thinly across a long tail rather than concentrating anywhere in particular.
| Holder | Country | Addresses |
|---|---|---|
| Telstra | Australia | 13,448,704 |
| Microplex | Australia | 5,271,296 |
| TPG Telecom | Australia | 2,932,480 |
| Amazon | United States | 1,494,528 |
| Vocus Retail | Australia | 1,141,760 |
| AARNet | Australia | 1,135,872 |
| Vodafone Australia | Australia | 1,095,168 |
What kind of network it is
The same registered address space, split by what its network is actually for rather than who runs it.
Consumer internet provider space dominates, and hosting is a modest slice of the total. That is not a universal shape. Plenty of countries lean far more heavily toward hosting and cloud infrastructure. Australia’s address space still looks, on paper, like a country’s worth of home internet connections.
The part of the market we can actually see
Address blocks change hands: sold, leased, reclaimed. Most of that motion is invisible unless you are the records office watching every transfer directly. We are not, but we do track the public leasing marketplace, which is at least one channel we can see into.
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60,928 addresses is a rounding error against the roughly 57.5 million we measure as Australian, about one tenth of one percent. Whatever larger movement happens in Australia’s address space, it is not happening through the public leasing market at any real scale. It is happening through direct transfers between registrants, a channel that stays invisible unless you are the one recording it.
So, how many
Somewhere between 46 and 58 million, depending on whether you are counting paperwork or measuring wires, and the gap between those two is not noise. It is two different questions wearing the same units. How much address space is Australia allocated and how much address space is actually running in Australia are not the same question, and a country’s real number moves depending on which one you meant. The one number never to trust on its own is the one that comes from adding up raw registration records without first asking what else might be hiding in there, because for at least one country, most of that raw number turned out to be nothing more than a records office’s own filing cabinet.