New ISPs getting of the ground without IPv4?

Mon Nov 2 21:57:22 UTC 2015

On 2 November 2015 at 12:53, <nanog-isp at mail.com> wrote:

> Surprisingly enough demand for Internet services did not end when we ran
> out of IPv4. I'd like to hear from the guys and gals starting new ISPs how
> they are facing this brave new world.
>
> Is it NATs all the way down?
>

No NAT.

>
> Is IPv6 the knight in shining armor?
>

We have IPv6 (dual stack) but mostly because it is the right thing to do
and a few tech savvy customers appreciate it.

>
> Are you getting enough IPs? If not, how are you coping? Buying/renting
> some, tunneling to somebody who has some, what?
>

We buy them at approx $10 each. This is of course a burden. However we have
many costs in establishing a new customer. Our GPON ONU is much more than
the cost to get the IP-address.

> It's all good and well hearing about how you should dual stack and reading
> about how established players handle IPv6 and IPv4 exhaustion, but what do
> you do when dual stacking isn't an option and IPv6 only takes you so far?
>

I do not know how to answer that given that dual stack _is_ an option.

We have two basic options. One is to buy address space. The other is NAT.
Neither is free. We came to the conclusion that buying address space is the
best option for us. We believe that NAT would cause some customers to
choose a different ISP and that NAT can be almost as expensive per customer
if you factor in all costs.

I am still not too worried about the price of IPv4 address space. Many
companies have huge amounts of space that can be reclaimed and sold off.
This is especially true in the ARIN region. IPv4 space will always be
available, it is just a matter of how expensive it will be.

I hope that IPv6 becomes more widespread in the coming years. That should
lead to less customers that care about a global routable IPv4 address . As
a larger fraction of the traffic moves to IPv6 the carrier NAT solution
will scale better.

Regards,

Baldur