Nortel, in bankruptcy, sells IPv4 address block for $7.5 million

Fri Mar 25 03:12:33 UTC 2011

What is needed is for the networks in the transit-free club to decide
they will not honor any "gray market" route advertisements resulting
from extra-normal transfers of this nature, whether the announcement
is from a peer or a customer.  As we are all aware, no real dent was
ever made in routing table growth except by Sprint deciding what it
was willing to accept.

The up-side to a huge, unchecked gray market benefits "bad guys," such
as spammers, much more than it does ordinary operators and end-users,
on this I think we can all agree.

The recent thread on DFZ growth also demonstrates clearly that
uncertainty as to whether or not such an unchecked gray market will be
allowed to exist, or even thrive, is driving most of us to strike
routers with 500k FIB from our list (many of us have been doing so for
years.)  This means that the uncertainty has already created cost for
operators and thus end-users.

The sooner the big players get together on this and decide not to
allow such a gray market, the better off we will be.  Since some of
these big players have huge legacy address pools already, there is
little disadvantage to those networks refusing to honor gray market
announcements from their customers, and probably no disadvantage to
accepting them from peers, as long as they are not the sole actor.

I anxiously await an xtra-normal announcement forbidding extra-normal routes.

-- 
Jeff S Wheeler <jsw at inconcepts.biz>
Sr Network Operator  /  Innovative Network Concepts