On 3-aug-2007, at 0:46, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
I expect the market in IPv4 addresses to trace the following pattern
If you would have cared to quote properly and thus read the previous
message you'd have seen that ARIN doesn't want to allow an address
market. Since they are the ones administering 1.5 billion of the 2.5
billion addresses given out, including the legacy class A space, not
much is going to happen without their cooperation. (But note that the
US is at about 35% of the addresses it used up last year right now,
while China is at 110%. This will be the first year that China and
not the US is the largest user of address space.)
For the purpose of the rest of the discussion, please realize that
around 90% of the requests is satisfied with 10% of the address space
used per year and the other way around. I.e., 90% of all address
space is going to a fairly small number of large ISPs.
Phase 1: Anticipation
As the exhaustion in IPv4 address space nears there will be
increasing speculative acquisition of IPv4 address allocations.
The only people who can successfully request enough address space to
make a difference are the people who have been doing large requests
before. So the address space is going to end up with the large ISPs
regardless whether they play nice or try to get as much as possible
before supplies run out.
Phase 2: Confusion
The immeditate reaction to exhaustion of the address space will be
recriminations countered by 'I told you so'. Parties with excess
IPv4 capacity will investigate options for sale.
It will be interesting to see what ARIN does if (for instance) HP
tries to sell 30 million addresses. I don't think ARIN can let that
happen and I don't think that HP has a good case in court if ARIN
subsequently takes the addresses. (If they were going to sell them
obviously they didn't need them.)
What are the precedents here with phone number and address renumbering?
Phase 3: Speculation
You forget that the only people who'll have trouble are those that
need NEW address space. That's a relatively small percentage of the
internet community at any given time. And 90% of them can be served
from address space that is returned every year. (This can be 10+
million addresses per year.)
Phase 4: Asset Stripping
Large ISPs begin to exceed their existing IPv4 stock. They
discover that it is cheaper to buy a smaller ISP for its stock of
excess IPv4 address space than to buy from an IPv4 speculator.
Only if you need relatively few addresses.
Phase 5: Bubble bursts
Second round of I-told-you-sos as we welcome large numbers of people
on IPv6. Sweet!
It is in the strategic interests of ISPs to deploy not just any
hyper-NAT but a hyperNAT that drives to deployment of IPv6 and
minimize the length of the crisis phase. If they acted soon enough
it might even be possible to avoid the buble phase entirely.
NAT isn't the only answer to the question "I can't get IPv4
addresses, what do I do?" Using IPv6 and a proxy to reach the IPv4
world is much, much cleaner. And it also works from v4 to v6. We
really should start advocating this as the preferred transition
mechanism.
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