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Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit

  • From: Geoff Huston
  • Date: Sat Feb 23 19:39:42 2008


Stephen Sprunk wrote:

Thus spake "Tom Vest" <[email protected]>
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?

Rechecking my own post to PPML, 73 Xtra Large orgs held 79.28% of ARIN's address space as of May 07; my apology for a faulty memory, but it's not off by enough to invalidate the point.


I can phrase it another way, working solely off the published data from the 5 RIRs (daily stats files)

Of the 13,521 IPv4 allocation transactions since 1 January 2006, some 103 transactions accounted for 42% of the total volume of IPv4 address space allocated in this period. (i.e. an allocation event of a /12 or greater)

24 were recorded in the APNIC report, 37 in the ARIN report(*) and 31 in the RIPE report




The statistics came from ARIN Member Services in response to an email
inquiry. I don't believe they publish such things anywhere (other than what's in WHOIS), but you can verify yourself if you wish; they were quite willing to
give me any stats I asked for if they had the necessary data available.


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?

Most of the orgs in the Xtra Large class were already there before the
mega-mergers started; after all, you only need >/14 to be Xtra Large. Given
how most tend to operate in silos, they might still be separate orgs as far
as ARIN is concerned...



This data regarding allocations does not reflect after-the-event mergers. It simply looks at the size distribution in the daily stats files as reported by the RIRs.


In ARIN's case in particular 57% of all IPv4 addresses allocated since 1 January 2006 were allocated as part of a /11 or larger, and 88% were part of a /16 or greater. This equates to 6 transactions of a /11 (out of 3,546 individual transactions for the same period, or fractions of a percent. For /16 or larger there were 306 transactions out of 3,546, or 8.6%. Thats more than "a few dozen", but it does not also reflect mergers and aquisitions post allocation.


(*The ARIN report format had to be re-processed becuase of the differing procedure ARIN uses to update this report each day)



Geoff