Redeploying most of 127/8, 0/8, 240/4 and *.0 as unicast

Thu Nov 18 19:37:49 UTC 2021

Steven Bakker <steven.bakker at ams-ix.net> wrote:
> > ... the gain is 4 weeks of
> > extra ip address space in terms of estimated consumption.
>
> The burn rate is the best argument I've seen against the idea so far.

I'm glad you think so, since it's easy to refute.

There will be no future free-for-all that burns through 300 million
IPv4 addresses in 4 months.

When IPv4 addresses were being given away for free, of course people
were grabbing them as fast as they could.  Particularly after everyone
could see the end of the supply coming.  It took detailed administrative
bureacracy, checking paperwork "justifications", to just slow down the
free-for-all!  (In the early '90s I got 140.174/16 for the same cost as
a /24, by sending a few emails asking for it.  By the end of the '90s,
that /16 was one of the major assets of our small ISP!)

Now that has ended, and addresses actually cost money in a real market.
Companies are only buying what they need, because they have other uses
for their money.  And other companies are selling addresses that they
once obtained and no longer plan to use.  It's like the difference
between getting free land from the government, versus having to pay for
it.  You'd rather have 100 acres or 1000 acres if it's free.  But if you
have to buy it, well, half an acre is still pretty nice, and leaves you
some money to build a house on it.

Now we have a market.  When low supply raises the price of something,
people are going to buy less of it.  The initial price rise from $0/each
to $11.25 was in 2011, after ARIN announced there would be no more free
addresses, and Microsoft bought Nortel's addresses out of bankruptcy.
The Internet world has adapted.  It's been a decade since that
adaptation.  Adding some global unicast address supply in a few years
would reduce prices, benefiting consumers, but won't take us back to the
old pre-market model.

Here's an analysis as of late 2020 of the IPv4 transfer market:

  https://circleid.com/posts/20201125-ipv4-market-and-ipv6-deployment

It shows a range of 6 million to 16 million addresses transferred (sold)
per quarter.  This roughly matches Geoff Huston's analysis of both free
RIR allocations, and purchased IPv4 transfers.  Geoff reports about
2.2 million allocated and 26 million transferred in 2020:

  https://circleid.com/posts/20210117-a-look-back-at-the-world-of-ip-addressing-in-2020

At current rates, 300 to 400 million addresses would last more than a
decade!  (Compare this to the ~50 /8s unadvertised in global routing
tables, about 838 million addresses, that are currently owned but likely
to be sold to someone who'll route them, sometime in the next decade.)

There will be no future free-for-all that burns through 300 million
IPv4 addresses in 4 months.

	John