IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit

Fri Feb 22 11:54:11 UTC 2008

On 22 feb 2008, at 0:55, Tom Vest wrote:

>> I agree, to a point.  My prediction is that when the handful of  
>> mega-ISPs are unable to get the massive quantities of IPv4  
>> addresses they need (a few dozen account for 90% of all consumption  
>> in the ARIN region)...

> I keep reading assertions like this. Is there any public,  
> authoritative evidence to support this claim?

You can download files with all the delegation info from ftp.arin.net.

> If there is, is this 90% figure a new development, or rather the  
> product of changes in ownership (e.g., MCI-VZ-UU, SBC-ATT, etc.),  
> changes in behavior (a run on the bank), some combination of the  
> two, or something else altogether?

No, simply because large ISPs need lots of addresses, everyone else  
can make do with just a few.

On 22 feb 2008, at 10:24, Roland Perry wrote:

> I would not be surprised to learn that "consumption in the ARIN  
> region" includes all the legacy assignments.

By definition, no new legacy assignments are given out.  :-)

So simply looking at recent data will correct for this.

> So the quoted metric may well be true, but as unhelpful as claiming  
> that "MIT has more address space than the whole of China" (as some  
> people do from time to time).

Which is complete nonsense. MIT has 18/8, which is a little under 17  
million addresses. I'm assuming that whatever else on top of that they  
have doesn't amount to a significant number. China is eating up IPv4  
address space like it's going out of style (hm...) and they're now the  
third largest holder with 140 million IPv4 addresses, a hair shy of  
Japan's 142 million and 1/10th of the US's 1411 million.

On 22 feb 2008, at 10:31, Randy Bush wrote:

> dear arin hostfolk.  could we please have the histogram for the last  
> few years where the Y axis is the amount of allocation and the X  
> axis is the number of organizations with that total size of new  
> allocations during the period?  you'll have to bucket alloc size in  
> some useful way, probably a /16 or shorter or something.

I can't see organizations in ARIN's delegation records, but simply  
counting delegations and rounding sizes to the closest power of 2  
results this for 20070101 - now:

+------+-------------+--------+
| size | delegations | Maddrs |
+------+-------------+--------+
|   10 |           2 |   6.82 |
|   11 |           5 |  11.27 |
|   12 |           6 |   6.14 |
|   13 |           6 |   2.96 |
|   14 |           5 |   1.14 |
|   15 |          12 |   1.58 |
|   16 |          24 |   1.53 |
|   17 |          27 |   0.87 |
|   18 |          51 |   0.82 |
|   19 |         110 |   0.90 |
|   20 |         474 |   1.94 |
|   21 |         227 |   0.46 |
|   22 |         415 |   0.42 |
|   23 |           1 |   0.00 |
|   24 |          11 |   0.00 |
+------+-------------+--------+

Totals:

+-------------+--------+
| delegations | Maddrs |
+-------------+--------+
|        1376 |  36.86 |
+-------------+--------+

I.e., /18 or shorter is 134 delegations (10%) and 33.08 million  
addresses (90%).

However, ARIN has the unfortunate practice of backdating delegations  
when people come back for more address space and the new and old  
blocks can form a bigger block. Below the same numbers but with logic  
that tries to correct for this, which makes it impossible to easily  
show the correct numbers of delegations and addresses in one table:

+------+-------------+
| size | delegations |
+------+-------------+
|    8 |           1 |
|   10 |           4 |
|   11 |          13 |
|   12 |          12 |
|   13 |          12 |
|   14 |          17 |
|   15 |          35 |
|   16 |          38 |
|   17 |          61 |
|   18 |          95 |
|   19 |         222 |
|   20 |         440 |
|   21 |         231 |
|   22 |         425 |
|   23 |           5 |
|   24 |          13 |
+------+-------------+

+------+--------+
| size | Maddrs |
+------+--------+
|    8 |   3.15 |
|   10 |   7.34 |
|   11 |  16.58 |
|   12 |   8.37 |
|   13 |   2.74 |
|   14 |   1.39 |
|   15 |   3.31 |
|   16 |   0.14 |
|   17 |   1.12 |
|   18 |   0.84 |
|   19 |   1.39 |
|   20 |   1.27 |
|   21 |   0.47 |
|   22 |   0.43 |
|   23 |   0.00 |
|   24 |   0.00 |
+------+--------+

Total delegations: 1624, millions of addresses: 48.55.

/18 or more: 195 (12%), 44.16 (91%).