The Department of Work and Pensions, UK has an entire /8

Seth Mos seth.mos at dds.nl
Wed Sep 19 13:51:24 UTC 2012


Op 19-9-2012 14:35, Leo Bicknell schreef:
> In a message written on Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 09:11:50PM -0700, Mike Hale wrote:
>> I'd love to hear the reasoning for this.  Why would it be bad policy
>> to force companies to use the resources they are assigned or give them
>> back to the general pool?
> There's also a ROI problem.  People smarter than I have done the
> math, and figured out that if X% of the address space can be reclaimed
> via these efforts, that gains Y years of address space.  Turns out
> Y is pretty darn small no matter how agressive the search for
> underutilized space.  Basically the RIR's would have to spin up
> more staff and, well, harass pretty much every IP holder for a
> couple of years just to delay the transition to IPv6 by a couple
> of years.  In the short term moving the date a couple of years may
> seem like a win, but in the long term its really insignificant.
> It's also important to note that RIR's are paid for by the users,
> the ramp up in staff and legal costs of such and effort falls back
> on the community.  Is delaying IPv6 adoption worth having RIR fees
> double?
Forcing a government organization to renumber their (large!) network to 
10/8 just to give it back it to ARIN would be a massive undertaking. 
There are considerable drawbacks:

1. The renumbering of a government organization is payed for by the UK 
taxpayers. I'm sure the UK can use the funds somewhere else right now.
2. The time taken to complete this operation would likely run into 
years, see 1.
3. Even if the renumbering completes by 2015 it would be far too late, 
since we need it now rather then later.
4. The actual value of the "sale" of the /8 could either be huge in 
2015, or insignificant in 2015.

So the irony is that the taxpayer lobbying for return wants to have the 
/8 returned to or sell it. But there is a significant non-zero cost and 
he would be paying for it himself.

I also like the idea of public services to be reachable in the future. 
Just because it is not in use now, I'll see them using it in the future.

Regards,

Seth





More information about the NANOG mailing list