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Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit

  • From: Iljitsch van Beijnum
  • Date: Fri Feb 22 13:11:30 2008


On 22 feb 2008, at 16:03, <[email protected]> <[email protected]> wrote:


 MIT has only 17 million addresses but China has 140 million.
 Along with Japan at 142 million, these are the top two holders
 of IP addresses with the USA trailing at 48.5 million.

Huh? Where do you get 48.5 million?

Well, your last posting was long and complicated and filled
with figures but the second line from the bottom seemed to be
saying that.

Yes, from january first, 2007, to now. :-)


So the US has AT LEAST 278 million non-legacy addresses
allocated/ assigned.

Fine. The point is for someone, (maybe you?) to do the research,
sort out these figures, and provide us with a paragraph or
so that amounts to a nice comprehensive sound-bite of the
current state of affairs.

The trouble is that the data contains a lot of complexities, so you need to make a number of choices in what you include and what you don't include.


Personally, I'd simply say that China is the third largest holder of IPv4 addresses and they have 8 times as many of them as MIT does.

But the US government still has a little more than China... (Some 10 / 8s.)

Also, some of the legacy blocks, such as
4/8 and 12/8 are de facto used by ISPs to address customers.

They are often used in a wasteful fashion because when the network
architecture and subnetting was designed, there was no need to be
frugal. Therefore, the big numbers are misleading. I was hoping
to see something that is closer to what actual usage is.

You'll have to look in the routing table for that. I currently don't have the tools to retrieve that information, and I'm not sure if it's worth it to write the necessary scripts.


Whichever way you slice it, the US is the largest holder of
address space by a factor of more than 2,

No argument about that. But lots of it is inefficiently used with
no way to recover the waste before we run out of IPv4. Water under
the bridge.

But some people want to hoist up that water and dump it back in on the other side of the bridge by creating an IPv4 address market. If addresses become available on such a market, doesn't that mean that they could have also be reclaimed through other mechanisms?


and, until 2007,
the largest user of new address space.

I wonder if that includes all the addresses that we registered with
ARIN but use in Asia and Europe.

Obviously it does. I've often thought that the very low number of addresses that India seems to have (14 million) can be explained in this way. However, here in Europe the American carriers all use RIPE address space, AFIAK, so I'm not convinced this is an extremely large number. Also, RIPE and APNIC used up significantly more address space last year than ARIN: 63 and 70 million vs 48.5 million for ARIN. So it would surprise me if the effect was very large.


This probably needs some serious
research effort to bottom out.

How will doing that research help?


In addition, since we are likely
 to use up all possible IPv4 addresses by 2011,

No, that's when the depletion of the IANA pool is predicted.
The RIRs also hold 400 million addresses for their day-to-day
operations, which will take at least another year, maybe two,
to deplete.

Assuming that there isn't a run on the bank. I expect that it will all
disappear much quicker than we think.

That's not an unreasonable expectation, but I see no way to model it.


Interestingly, if a run on the bank happens, presumably the RIRs will keep an eye out for fraudulous applications, so everyone gets to lie to approximately the same degree, which means that everyone can more or less get the address space to go with the future extrapolation of past growth. Discounting those that don't pay attention and miss out, this means that everyone gets more or less what they would have gotten later without the run on the bank, so the result isn't very different, it just happens a bit sooner. Only the new players that could possibly have gotten some IPv4 address space before it was about to run out will be left empty handed.