97.128.0.0/9 allocation to verizon wireless

Sun Feb 8 02:24:30 UTC 2009

Dear list,

Since IPv4 exhaustion is an increasingly serious and timely topic
lately, I would like to point out something that interests me, and maybe
everyone else who will be spending a lot on Tylenol and booze when we
really do run out of v4 IPs.

I have trouble understanding why an ARIN record for a network regularly
receiving new, out-sized IPv4 allocations on the order of millions of
addresses at once would publish a remark like the one below, indicating
that Verizon Wireless has about 2 million IPs allocated.

OrgName:    Cellco Partnership DBA Verizon Wireless 
CIDR:       97.128.0.0/9 
Comment:    Verizon Wireless currently has 44.3 Million
Comment:    subscribers with 2.097 Million IP addresses allocated.
RegDate:    2008-04-14

This may be unscientific and full of error, but if you add up all the
IPs behind AS6167, you get a pretty big number, about 27 million.  If I
make more dangerous assumptions, I might argue that a network with a
need for 2 million IPs, at the time this /9 was handed out, already had
about 19 million.  Then it received 8 million more.

Sure, smart phones are becoming more popular.  It's reasonable to assume
that virtually all cell phones will eventually have an IP address almost
all the time.  But that isn't the case right now, and the ARIN is in the
business of supplying its members with six months worth of addresses.
If everyone is expected to run out and buy a new phone and start using
"the Google" right away, and stay on it all the time, maybe cellular
operators really need a lot more IP addresses.  If not, why does Verizon
Wireless have 27 million IPs when the above comment indicates they need
only a tenth of that?

- j