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Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit

  • From: Tom Vest
  • Date: Fri Feb 22 10:45:10 2008


On Feb 22, 2008, at 7:54 PM, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

On 22 feb 2008, at 0:55, Tom Vest wrote:

I agree, to a point. My prediction is that when the handful of mega-ISPs are unable to get the massive quantities of IPv4 addresses they need (a few dozen account for 90% of all consumption in the ARIN region)...

I keep reading assertions like this. Is there any public, authoritative evidence to support this claim?

You can download files with all the delegation info from ftp.arin.net.

You mean the stats files, which provide delegation date, type, starting number, length, etc.?
Which one of the published fields is the key field that enables you to identify the common recipient(s) of successive delegations over time?
I'm assuming that the quoted 90% figure is some kind of aggregate (anything else would be pretty arbitrary), but I don't see anything in the public record that suggests how that aggregate might be produced...?

If there is, is this 90% figure a new development, or rather the product of changes in ownership (e.g., MCI-VZ-UU, SBC-ATT, etc.), changes in behavior (a run on the bank), some combination of the two, or something else altogether?

No, simply because large ISPs need lots of addresses, everyone else can make do with just a few.

But in the absence of some other metric for largeness, that sounds like a tautology. Large ISPs are the ones that demand lots of addresses... ergo to demand a lot of addresses is to be large...

My question is not an entirely uninformed one. I'm quite familiar with the public stats. I just don't see how they transparently support this claim.

Clarification would be greatly appreciated,

TV

On 22 feb 2008, at 10:24, Roland Perry wrote:

I would not be surprised to learn that "consumption in the ARIN region" includes all the legacy assignments.

By definition, no new legacy assignments are given out. :-)

So simply looking at recent data will correct for this.

So the quoted metric may well be true, but as unhelpful as claiming that "MIT has more address space than the whole of China" (as some people do from time to time).

Which is complete nonsense. MIT has 18/8, which is a little under 17 million addresses. I'm assuming that whatever else on top of that they have doesn't amount to a significant number. China is eating up IPv4 address space like it's going out of style (hm...) and they're now the third largest holder with 140 million IPv4 addresses, a hair shy of Japan's 142 million and 1/10th of the US's 1411 million.

On 22 feb 2008, at 10:31, Randy Bush wrote:

dear arin hostfolk. could we please have the histogram for the last few years where the Y axis is the amount of allocation and the X axis is the number of organizations with that total size of new allocations during the period? you'll have to bucket alloc size in some useful way, probably a /16 or shorter or something.

I can't see organizations in ARIN's delegation records, but simply counting delegations and rounding sizes to the closest power of 2 results this for 20070101 - now:

+------+-------------+--------+
| size | delegations | Maddrs |
+------+-------------+--------+
|   10 |           2 |   6.82 |
|   11 |           5 |  11.27 |
|   12 |           6 |   6.14 |
|   13 |           6 |   2.96 |
|   14 |           5 |   1.14 |
|   15 |          12 |   1.58 |
|   16 |          24 |   1.53 |
|   17 |          27 |   0.87 |
|   18 |          51 |   0.82 |
|   19 |         110 |   0.90 |
|   20 |         474 |   1.94 |
|   21 |         227 |   0.46 |
|   22 |         415 |   0.42 |
|   23 |           1 |   0.00 |
|   24 |          11 |   0.00 |
+------+-------------+--------+

Totals:

+-------------+--------+
| delegations | Maddrs |
+-------------+--------+
|        1376 |  36.86 |
+-------------+--------+

I.e., /18 or shorter is 134 delegations (10%) and 33.08 million addresses (90%).

However, ARIN has the unfortunate practice of backdating delegations when people come back for more address space and the new and old blocks can form a bigger block. Below the same numbers but with logic that tries to correct for this, which makes it impossible to easily show the correct numbers of delegations and addresses in one table:

+------+-------------+
| size | delegations |
+------+-------------+
|    8 |           1 |
|   10 |           4 |
|   11 |          13 |
|   12 |          12 |
|   13 |          12 |
|   14 |          17 |
|   15 |          35 |
|   16 |          38 |
|   17 |          61 |
|   18 |          95 |
|   19 |         222 |
|   20 |         440 |
|   21 |         231 |
|   22 |         425 |
|   23 |           5 |
|   24 |          13 |
+------+-------------+

+------+--------+
| size | Maddrs |
+------+--------+
|    8 |   3.15 |
|   10 |   7.34 |
|   11 |  16.58 |
|   12 |   8.37 |
|   13 |   2.74 |
|   14 |   1.39 |
|   15 |   3.31 |
|   16 |   0.14 |
|   17 |   1.12 |
|   18 |   0.84 |
|   19 |   1.39 |
|   20 |   1.27 |
|   21 |   0.47 |
|   22 |   0.43 |
|   23 |   0.00 |
|   24 |   0.00 |
+------+--------+

Total delegations: 1624, millions of addresses: 48.55.

/18 or more: 195 (12%), 44.16 (91%).