North American Network Operators Group
Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: OMB: IPv6 by June 2008

  • From: David Conrad
  • Date: Fri Jul 08 03:44:03 2005 
On Jul 7, 2005, at 2:14 PM, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
Right again. And like prospecting for oil, at some point you're burning it up faster than you can prospect it.

There are some 45 - 50 /8s assigned to single organizations. Let's assume for simplicity that those can all be reclaimed. That's 4 years at a /8 a month. So far so good. Then there are 40 - 45 /8s in class B space. That means 256 times as much effort to reclaim the address space, or reclaiming about 10 class Bs a day...
There is, of course, a slightly different model:

As IPv4 address space becomes less freely available, there will be an increase in black and gray market transactions for that address space. Since these transactions involve actual money instead of the more difficult to account for human activity dealing with the RIRs or ISPs, there will be financial incentive both to reduce consumption as well as offer allocated but unused space via the black and gray markets.

In this model, you get a natural, market-driven evolution towards a two tiered routing hierarchy (call it "the core" and "the edge") mediated by That Which Shall Not Be Named. As folks who "own" address space (yes, I know, address space isn't "owned". I suspect this convention might break down pretty quickly as address space becomes more scarce) figure out there's gold in dem dar unused tracts of address space, they'll make a quick buck selling it to somebody who desires it more (as demonstrated by their willingness to pay the "owner's" price) and moving their infrastructure behind a TWSNBN. Large blocks and provider aggregateable space will command a higher price, long prefix blobs spread out randomly a lower price due to the pain of trying to get it routed.

Imagine (to pick an example purely at random) the President of MIT being presented with the choice of receiving a very large wad of cash in exchange for 18/8. How big would that wad have to be before she decided it'd be worth migrating 18/8 to 10/8 and living behind a TWSNBN?

Of course, I'm sure this is all just a feverish nightmare caused by a bad habanero pepper... (why do I get a recurring image of Peter Lothberg wandering around the room collecting all the little balls he can?).

Rgds,
-drc

P.S. No, I am not suggesting this is a good or even a likely outcome. Just pointing out that there can be other forces coming into play as scarcity becomes more noticeable.