who gets a /32 [Re: IPV6 renumbering painless?]

Sun Nov 21 19:12:09 UTC 2004

Thus spake "Iljitsch van Beijnum" <iljitsch at muada.com>
> On 20-nov-04, at 18:34, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
>
>>>> Don't have "real connectivity"?
>
>>> That's right. If you need internet access, you need it to be faster than 
>>> 16 kbps.
>
>> Who said the only purpose of IP was to connect to the Internet?
>
> Not me. But if you don't connect to the internet you don't contribute to 
> the global routing table so there is no issue.  :-)
>
> The point is, that these days applications such as mail and web are 
> sufficiently heavy that you can't even run them cost effectively over dial 
> up (wasting your employee's time costs more than the fatter line) let 
> alone less.

That assumes the company wants their employees using web or email, or that 
there are even humans at a site to begin with.  Pipeline control systems, 
weather stations, cash registers, credit card machines and ATMs, warehouse 
inventory scanners, stock exchanges, etc. have no need to _directly_ talk to 
the outside world.  People in customer-facing roles, like those at banks or 
airports, are not supposed to be surfing the web or even doing email at 
work.  Many companies are still using green-screen apps or graphical 
applications that have a measured per-terminal average of under 1kbps; I ran 
into one company tunneling 9600bps serial over X.25 over IP -- ugly, but it 
worked for thousands of terminals.

However, all of these low-bandwidth hosts in far-off lands talk to a 
corporate datacenter somewhere, perhaps their own or a vendor's or 
customer's, and those hosts often talk to several other hosts who might also 
need (or at least have) access to the Internet.  The options are NAT, ULAs, 
or PI space; total cost of implementation seems lowest for ULAs.

>> In my experience, they will announce the aggregate from all hub sites 
>> plus more-specifics for that hub and the sites directly connected to it. 
>> Traffic that comes into the wrong hub due to prefix length filters (or 
>> Internet outages) is back-hauled inside the corporate backbone.
>
> It would be interested to see some good statistics on this stuff. However 
> many enterprises any of us has seen from the inside, it's still unlikly to 
> be a statistically relevant sample.

An unfiltered BGP feed should give you stats on what's quoted immediately 
above.  If you want numbers of publicly-invisible hosts, even if you knew 
who to ask most would refuse to answer for "security reasons" or require an 
NDA.  My best guess, having been on the inside at a few dozen enterprises, 
is that they number in the high millions to low tens of millions today.  In 
five years, it'll be in the mid tens of millions as more and more new 
hardware comes with IP connectivity built-in and legacy apps are gradually 
updated.

S

Stephen Sprunk         "God does not play dice."  --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723         "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS        dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking 