IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit

Fri Feb 22 18:00:02 UTC 2008

On 22 feb 2008, at 16:03, <michael.dillon at bt.com>  
<michael.dillon at bt.com> wrote:

>>>  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.

>> Huh? Where do you get 48.5 million?

> Well, your last posting was long and complicated and filled
> with figures but the second line from the bottom seemed to be
> saying that.

Yes, from january first, 2007, to now.  :-)

>> So the US has AT LEAST 278 million non-legacy addresses
>> allocated/ assigned.

> Fine. The point is for someone, (maybe you?) to do the research,
> sort out these figures, and provide us with a paragraph or
> so that amounts to a nice comprehensive sound-bite of the
> current state of affairs.

The trouble is that the data contains a lot of complexities, so you  
need to make a number of choices in what you include and what you  
don't include.

Personally, I'd simply say that China is the third largest holder of  
IPv4 addresses and they have 8 times as many of them as MIT does.

But the US government still has a little more than China... (Some 10 / 
8s.)

>> Also, some of the legacy blocks, such as
>> 4/8 and 12/8 are de facto used by ISPs to address customers.

> They are often used in a wasteful fashion because when the network
> architecture and subnetting was designed, there was no need to be
> frugal. Therefore, the big numbers are misleading. I was hoping
> to see something that is closer to what actual usage is.

You'll have to look in the routing table for that. I currently don't  
have the tools to retrieve that information, and I'm not sure if it's  
worth it to write the necessary scripts.

>> Whichever way you slice it, the US is the largest holder of
>> address space by a factor of more than 2,

> No argument about that. But lots of it is inefficiently used with
> no way to recover the waste before we run out of IPv4. Water under
> the bridge.

But some people want to hoist up that water and dump it back in on the  
other side of the bridge by creating an IPv4 address market. If  
addresses become available on such a market, doesn't that mean that  
they could have also be reclaimed through other mechanisms?

>> and, until 2007,
>> the largest user of new address space.

> I wonder if that includes all the addresses that we registered with
> ARIN but use in Asia and Europe.

Obviously it does. I've often thought that the very low number of  
addresses that India seems to have (14 million) can be explained in  
this way. However, here in Europe the American carriers all use RIPE  
address space, AFIAK, so I'm not convinced this is an extremely large  
number. Also, RIPE and APNIC used up significantly more address space  
last year than ARIN: 63 and 70 million vs 48.5 million for ARIN. So it  
would surprise me if the effect was very large.

> This probably needs some serious
> research effort to bottom out.

How will doing that research help?

>>> In addition, since we are likely
>>>  to use up all possible IPv4 addresses by 2011,

>> No, that's when the depletion of the IANA pool is predicted.
>> The RIRs also hold 400 million addresses for their day-to-day
>> operations, which will take at least another year, maybe two,
>> to deplete.

> Assuming that there isn't a run on the bank. I expect that it will all
> disappear much quicker than we think.

That's not an unreasonable expectation, but I see no way to model it.

Interestingly, if a run on the bank happens, presumably the RIRs will  
keep an eye out for fraudulous applications, so everyone gets to lie  
to approximately the same degree, which means that everyone can more  
or less get the address space to go with the future extrapolation of  
past growth. Discounting those that don't pay attention and miss out,  
this means that everyone gets more or less what they would have gotten  
later without the run on the bank, so the result isn't very different,  
it just happens a bit sooner. Only the new players that could possibly  
have gotten some IPv4 address space before it was about to run out  
will be left empty handed.