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Cost per prefix [was: request for help w/ ATT and terminology]

  • From: Patrick W. Gilmore
  • Date: Sun Jan 20 04:28:13 2008

On Jan 19, 2008, at 12:55 PM, William Herrin wrote:
On Jan 19, 2008 11:48 AM, Andy Davidson <[email protected]> wrote:
There's some debate in RIPE land right now that discusses, "what
actually is the automatic, free, right to PI" ? Every other network
in the world pays the cost when someone single homes but wants their /
24 prefix on everyone else's router. If one had to pay a registry
for PI, then small networks would have to think about the negative
externalities of their decision to deploy using PI. 

There was some related work on ARIN PPML last year. The rough numbers
suggested that the attributable economic cost of one IPv4 prefix in
the DFZ (whether PI, PA or TE) was then in the neighborhood of $8000
USD per year.

I haven't seen that work, but I am guessing this number is an aggregate (i.e. every cost to everyone on the 'Net combined), not per- network? See, I'm just looking at that TWO BILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR number and thinking to myself, "um, yeah, right". :)

So, given that there are 27206 ASes in the table (latest CIDR report), that means it costs each AS, on average, less than $0.30/year to accept a prefix. I'm thinking that billing each new network with its own prefix would cost more than $0.30/recipient.

Let's make it easy. Let's say only 8K ASNs actually take a full table. (Rest have partial tables or two defaults or something.) So each network needs $1/year per prefix. I still think the billing infrastructure would cost more than the bill itself.

But then, the telcos have been in that situation for a century. Why shouldn't the Internet follow in their footsteps?

Feel free to explain how confused I am. (But be warned, I am not going to believe it costs $2B/year to run a multi-homed network with two full feeds. :)

--
TTFN,
patrick