IP4 Space

Owen DeLong owen at delong.com
Sat Mar 6 01:19:05 UTC 2010


On Mar 6, 2010, at 6:08 AM, David Conrad wrote:

> On Mar 5, 2010, at 1:21 PM, Owen DeLong wrote:
>>> The interesting question is at what point _can_ you do what you want without IPv4.  It seems obvious that that point will be after the IPv4 free pool is exhausted, and as such, allocated-but-not-efficiently-used addresses will likely become worth the effort to reclaim.
>>> 
>> Ah, but, that assumes that the need is located in a similar part of the network
>> to the reclamation, or, that the point of reclamation can be sufficiently motivated
>> to do so by the money offered by the point of need.
> 
> Actually, no, not really.  When you're dying of thirst, even muddy water can be mighty appealing.  The fact that some prefixes you obtain may be filtered because they're too short merely means you have additional costs to reach the sites you care about.  Don't know many ISPs that guarantee universal connectivity outside their own network today.  Not sure why that would change in the future.
> 
I think you mean long, not short.  While there aren't many ISPs that guarantee that
today (any?) it's still generally expected by customers and they are very unhappy
when $SITE_THEY_CARE_ABOUT is unreachable.

While the underlying guarantee likely won't change, I think it is even less likely
that customer expectations will degrade even further. I could be wrong.

However, my point was that if the organization with need is not the organization
able to do the reclamation, or, at least a customer of the organization doing the
reclamation, I expect the $$ they can offer to be a less than effective motivator
for an external unrelated organization to give up their space.

>> I suspect the organizations that have excess space and know where it is are
>> likely to hold onto it as a hedge against their future needs, or, try to extract
>> a very high market premium for it.
> 
> Such folks will also have to take into consideration opportunity cost.  Or they could make the strategic decision that all they really need is one or two ISP-provided public IPv4 addresses (in addition to IPv6) for their NATv4 box and public servers is all they really need and lease to their ISP the blocks they currently have in exchange for free connectivity or whatever.  Etc. Myriad of possibilities.
> 
Which comes back to my proximity argument -- If they leas to their provider, then,
their provider can only offer those addresses to their immediate customers. What
happens in such a lease when the lease expires and the original organization
decides they want the addresses back? I'd hat to be the organization that received
such addresses and suddenly faces a massive and urgent renumbering project.

> The point is that when the IPv4 free pool is exhausted, there will be disruptive change.  It isn't clear to me that pretty much any of the existing policies or practices regarding IPv4 addressing will continue to apply.  I've been disappointed that some folks in the RIR communities have been unable to understand this. Gave up arguing as I figure time will tell one way or the other.
> 
I understand it, but, I think that the most likely disruptive change will be that
new users mostly end up behind IPv6 and some form of LSN solution.
I'm hoping that it's mostly something like DS-Lite which gets the hell out
of the way as soon as the content the customer wants is available on
IPv6, but, I'm sure there will be providers that make uglier decisions
for their customers.

As such, I'm trying to do every thing I can to reach out to as many content
and services providers as possible to encourage them to add IPv6
capabilities to their content and services. The more of these we can
get dual-stack ready (even if they do something akin to Google,
where it's ready and essentially available except for the DNS
entries).  The more content and services that are prepared in this
manner, the less disruptive runout will be.

Additionally, content and services are MUCH easier to roll out than
enterprise networks. Almost as easy as end-user networks will
be in about a year. (I think that you'll see relatively complete
IPv6 solutions from most of the last-mile CPE and Head-End
(DSLAM, DOCSIS, [BG]PON, etc.) vendors within the next
12 months.  Some sooner than others.

Owen

> Regards,
> -drc





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