IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit

Fri Feb 22 13:01:13 UTC 2008

> > 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.

> Total delegations: 1624, millions of addresses: 48.55.

If one were to sum this up briefly, would it be correct to 
answer the MIT myth by saying:

   MIT has only 17 million addresses but China has 140 million. 
   Along with Japan at 142 million, these are the top two holders
   of IP addresses with the USA trailing at 48.5 million. Due to
   legacy allocations which are often used wastefully due to legacy
   technology, the USA is often quoted as having 1,411 million IP
   addresses but this does not reflect the current rules under which
   IP address registries operate. In addition, since we are likely
   to use up all possible IPv4 addresses by 2011, smart organizations
   are moving to IPv6 where there is no shortage forecast for 100
   years or more.

Personally, I would like to see the NRO take a crack at issuing some
kind of statement like this, to make it clear where the IP addresses
are used, why organizations like MIT are not villains, and why the
only way out of the steadily tightening straitjacket is to shift new
network growth onto IPv6 and get to work on sorting out all the 
minor technical issues that will only get sorted out by actually
pushing ahead with deployment, and use of IPv6.

Back in the early days of the Internet, it was easier because there was
a smaller community of vendors, network operators and protocol
developers.
Also, people didn't fully understand the implications of deploying the 
Internet as a replacement for all other networks in existence, therefore
they forged ahead blissfully unaware that they were about to stumble
head
on into a technical problem. The result, is that there was constant
movement,
constant bug fixing, and all the minor technical issues faded into
distant
memories.

All we have to do to make IPv6 ready for primetime is to deploy it for
real,
find the issues, fix the issues and move on. There is a real opportunity
here
for smaller companies who know how to run a lean mean operation, to
deploy
IPv6 Internet services at half the price of the large companies, and
come 
out on top in three years or so when the large companies buy them out
for
big sums of money. The price incentive will ensure a steady stream of
customers
who are willing to take the chance with a less-than-perfect best-effort
service.

--Michael Dillon

--Michael Dillon