SP's and v4 block assignments

Jimmy Hess mysidia at gmail.com
Wed Mar 16 05:31:23 UTC 2011


On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 8:11 AM, Andrew Elliott <andrellio at yahoo.com> wrote:

> How much are SP's charging and what are the thresholds?  What are default
> allocations based on?  (ie: size of the circuit, type of product, etc...)

For IPv4, there are policies provided by ARIN for this;  they come
from RFC 2050.
To be in compliance with registry addressing policies,
SPs and anyone else acting as a LIR  have to apply a utilization criterion, for
anything /29 or larger, at least, and collect documentation such as network
designs and contact details from their downstream user (for SWIP or RWHOIS),
and the utilization criterion is how the amount of IP space that the
ISP is allowed
to delegated is determined.

There is no provision or thing allowed called "pay for IP addresses".
You either have the unique hosts to justify that many IPs or you don't.
If you don't have the hosts and justified need, an SP can't sell you as many
IPs as you like.


However, if a SP has very little IP address space left to allocate,
going forward,
the SPs with no IPs left are likely to limit allocations  they would
make without
additional payment to subscribers of low margin products, to a smaller
delegation
than could be allowed or justified by the utilization criterion.

The availability and cost of IP addresses through ARIN 8.3 Specified Transfer
arrangements is likely to have a major effect: if the approximate
"cost for an IP address"
by specified transfer is low enough,   it will give an SPs a
convenient number they
can say they need to charge for IP addresses  (which SPs may just roll
into the cost of service,
with possible discounts to networks bringing their own IPs).

If the specified transfer market is reasonably stable in pricing and
availability of IPs,
under those circumstances you could see a "price per IP"  begin to appear.


I don't think there are any 'hard and fast' thresholds. But a SP is
not likely to
currently delegate a /24 for the average home DSL  or  20 meg Ethernet
user, for example, even
if they've got 200 hosts.
Without additional negotiation and payment  (unless that's some really
expensive 10 meg service.)


If IPs are that scarce, that user (to get a /24) for example, is
ultimately going to need to
pay enough to make up for the lost opportunity  to sell products that
require a unique
IP addresses  which would not be tied up if that user didn't get the entire /24.




Some SPs might even need to start reviewing subdelegations they already made,
to verify the utilization criterion is still met, or increase prices
for the service,
based on opportunity costs  due to utilized IP addresses,  if they are short on
IPs   and could use them to sell more product,  or profit by disposing
of the IPs
via  disaggregating their block and listing on the specified transfer market....

--
-JH




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