North American Network Operators Group

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Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit

  • From: Iljitsch van Beijnum
  • Date: Sun Feb 24 07:24:43 2008


On 23 feb 2008, at 4:02, Tom Vest wrote:


Which one of the published fields is the key field that enables you to identify the common recipient(s) of successive delegations over time?

There is no such field.

I didn't think so. So there is no accurate way to get anything like a sum of IP address per LIR at any point in time, now or in the the past, at least not using publicly available data.

If you spend some time looking at this data, you'll realize that there are very few hard and fast rules, there are exceptions on top of exceptions.


I'm not sure why exactly you want to know how much space goes to how many organizations, but for the largest blocks of address space, this shouldn't be too difficult to determine manually by simply doing whois lookups for these very large blocks. Alternatively, you can see which ASes announce which address blocks. For the small blocks you'll probably see that a number of those aren't announced by the holders but by their ISPs, but if you go beyond /16 that effect probably goes away quickly.

Given that impossibility, I still don't see how anyone can make the (increasingly oft repeated) claim that 90% (or any specific share) of address space is now going to some subset of the LIRs... no?

We know that pretty much 10% of the requests is responsible for 90% of the address space. So apparently 90% of the address space is going to at most 10% of the LIRs.


If there is some known method for doing this, and hence some defensible way to derive the actual (maybe 90%?) ratio, then I'd still be very interested to hear about it! I think all of the academics who spent several years trying (with mixed results) to come up with algorithms for inferring inter-AS relationships, etc. would be very interested too!

If you can explain precisely what it is you want to know and why that information is important to know, maybe I can find a way to dredge it up.