Cost per prefix [was: request for help w/ ATT and terminology]

Patrick W. Gilmore patrick at ianai.net
Sun Jan 20 04:43:46 UTC 2008


On Jan 19, 2008, at 12:55 PM, William Herrin wrote:
> On Jan 19, 2008 11:48 AM, Andy Davidson <andy at nosignal.org> wrote:
>> There's some debate in RIPE land right now that discusses, "what
>> actually is the automatic, free, right to PI" ?   Every other network
>> in the world pays the cost when someone single homes but wants  
>> their /
>> 24 prefix on everyone else's router.  If one had to pay a registry
>> for PI, then small networks would have to think about the negative
>> externalities of their decision to deploy using PI.

> There was some related work on ARIN PPML last year. The rough numbers
> suggested that the attributable economic cost of one IPv4 prefix in
> the DFZ (whether PI, PA or TE) was then in the neighborhood of $8000
> USD per year.

I haven't seen that work, but I am guessing this number is an  
aggregate (i.e. every cost to everyone on the 'Net combined), not per- 
network?  See, I'm just looking at that TWO BILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR  
number and thinking to myself, "um, yeah, right". :)

So, given that there are 27206 ASes in the table (latest CIDR report),  
that means it costs each AS, on average, less than $0.30/year to  
accept a prefix.  I'm thinking that billing each new network with its  
own prefix would cost more than $0.30/recipient.

Let's make it easy.  Let's say only 8K ASNs actually take a full  
table.  (Rest have partial tables or two defaults or something.)  So  
each network needs $1/year per prefix.  I still think the billing  
infrastructure would cost more than the bill itself.

But then, the telcos have been in that situation for a century.  Why  
shouldn't the Internet follow in their footsteps?

Feel free to explain how confused I am.  (But be warned, I am not  
going to believe it costs $2B/year to run a multi-homed network with  
two full feeds. :)

-- 
TTFN,
patrick




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