OMB: IPv6 by June 2008

Iljitsch van Beijnum iljitsch at muada.com
Fri Jul 8 09:27:42 UTC 2005


On 8-jul-2005, at 9:42, David Conrad wrote:


>> There are some 45 - 50 /8s assigned to single organizations. Let's  
>> assume for simplicity that those can all be reclaimed. That's 4  
>> years at a /8 a month. So far so good. Then there are 40 - 45 /8s  
>> in class B space. That means 256 times as much effort to reclaim  
>> the address space, or reclaiming about 10 class Bs a day...
>>


> There is, of course, a slightly different model:
>


> As IPv4 address space becomes less freely available, there will be  
> an increase in black and gray market transactions for that address  
> space.  Since these transactions involve actual money instead of  
> the more difficult to account for human activity dealing with the  
> RIRs or ISPs, there will be financial incentive both to reduce  
> consumption as well as offer allocated but unused space via the  
> black and gray markets.
>

I'm not saying you're wrong (although the RIRs may do their best to  
stop the sale of address space, with unknown success), but I'm not  
sure this will make a huge difference.

There are currently both holders of big chunks of address space, and  
holders of small chunks of address space, as well as organizations  
that burn up massive amounts of address space and those that use up  
very little. I can easily see how it makes sense for the users of  
relatively small amounts of address space to purchase or lease it  
from holders of (largely) unused /8s. At $1 per address, buying a /24  
rather than jump through RIR hoops is probably a good deal for most  
people, while at $1 per address selling off your /8 is certainly  
worth the trouble.

However, I don't think the likes of Comcast (which received 3 /10s or  
3/4 of a /8 this year, or more than $12 million worth at our  
speculated $1/addr) are going to want to spend this kind of money as  
long as there is ANY chance they can get addresses from the RIRs.

And then, think about it: how much money per address would you have  
to offer to someone with a spare /24 to part from those addresses?  
$1? $5? $10? I doubt the big ISPs that burn millions of addresses per  
year will be interested in that. Suddenly the transition to IPv6 (or  
recursive NAT...) is going to look very attractive.

So basically the tradeoffs between market forces and regular  
reclaming are similar: easy for /8s, hard for /16s and close to  
impossible for /24s.

And the real fun starts when people holding big blocks of address  
space start holding on to it because they expect to make more money  
that way in the future...




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