On Jul 7, 2005, at 2:14 PM, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
Right again. And like prospecting for oil, at some point you're
burning it up faster than you can prospect it.
There are some 45 - 50 /8s assigned to single organizations. Let's
assume for simplicity that those can all be reclaimed. That's 4
years at a /8 a month. So far so good. Then there are 40 - 45 /8s
in class B space. That means 256 times as much effort to reclaim
the address space, or reclaiming about 10 class Bs a day...
There is, of course, a slightly different model:
As IPv4 address space becomes less freely available, there will be an
increase in black and gray market transactions for that address
space. Since these transactions involve actual money instead of the
more difficult to account for human activity dealing with the RIRs or
ISPs, there will be financial incentive both to reduce consumption as
well as offer allocated but unused space via the black and gray markets.
In this model, you get a natural, market-driven evolution towards a
two tiered routing hierarchy (call it "the core" and "the edge")
mediated by That Which Shall Not Be Named. As folks who "own"
address space (yes, I know, address space isn't "owned". I suspect
this convention might break down pretty quickly as address space
becomes more scarce) figure out there's gold in dem dar unused tracts
of address space, they'll make a quick buck selling it to somebody
who desires it more (as demonstrated by their willingness to pay the
"owner's" price) and moving their infrastructure behind a TWSNBN.
Large blocks and provider aggregateable space will command a higher
price, long prefix blobs spread out randomly a lower price due to the
pain of trying to get it routed.
Imagine (to pick an example purely at random) the President of MIT
being presented with the choice of receiving a very large wad of cash
in exchange for 18/8. How big would that wad have to be before she
decided it'd be worth migrating 18/8 to 10/8 and living behind a TWSNBN?
Of course, I'm sure this is all just a feverish nightmare caused by a
bad habanero pepper... (why do I get a recurring image of Peter
Lothberg wandering around the room collecting all the little balls he
can?).
Rgds,
-drc
P.S. No, I am not suggesting this is a good or even a likely
outcome. Just pointing out that there can be other forces coming
into play as scarcity becomes more noticeable.