Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit
As recently suggested, ARIN has made the requested changes to produce a new histogram. It can be found at: http://www.arin.net/statistics/index.html#ipv4org. Note, this is the same link as the old histogram so you may need to refresh your browser's cache. Regards, Leslie Nobile Director, Registration Services ARIN Randy Bush wrote: ARIN has produced the histogram as requested and posted it to our website. It can be found at http://www.arin.net/statistics/index.html#ipv4org leslie, thank you ever so much. but the way it depects the date kinda obscures my point. my apologies for being a pita, but could the y axis please be normalized to /24 or /32 equivalents, i.e. the amount of address space? thank you! randy
Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit
Thus spake Owen DeLong [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Feb 24, 2008, at 12:45 PM, Stephen Sprunk wrote: The wording of the question and response referred only to ARIN members. That does not include most orgs with _only_ legacy allocations, but it would include orgs with both legacy and non- legacy allocations. Presumably, if an org had both types, both would have been included, but that wasn't explicitly stated since it wasn't relevant to the questions I was asking at the time. Not necessarily. Orgs which are end-users and not LIR/ISP subscriber members may have resources from ARIN without being members. 82% (by number) of all direct assignments are legacy*, and that includes all of the class A blocks. While I haven't requested the data to back it up, I find it fairly obvious that non-legacy direct assignments would be smaller on average and thus constitute far less than 18% (by size) of all assignments -- and a trivial amount of space overall compared to allocations to LIRs/ISPs. S * Same source. Stephen Sprunk God does not play dice. --Albert Einstein CCIE #3723 God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the K5SSSdice at every possible opportunity. --Stephen Hawking
RE: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit
Hi Randy- ARIN has produced the histogram as requested and posted it to our website. It can be found at http://www.arin.net/statistics/index.html#ipv4org Regards, Leslie Nobile Director, Registration Services ARIN -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Randy Bush Sent: Friday, February 22, 2008 4:32 AM To: Roland Perry Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit 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. thanks. randy
Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit
ARIN has produced the histogram as requested and posted it to our website. It can be found at http://www.arin.net/statistics/index.html#ipv4org leslie, thank you ever so much. but the way it depects the date kinda obscures my point. my apologies for being a pita, but could the y axis please be normalized to /24 or /32 equivalents, i.e. the amount of address space? thank you! randy
Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit
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.
Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit
In article [EMAIL PROTECTED], Iljitsch van Beijnum [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes I'm not sure why exactly you want to know how much space goes to how many organizations Several days ago, it seemed to me that Stephen Sprunk suggested that it would only take a change of policy of a handful of large ISPs (I'm carefully using new words here), to think party's over and start converting their users to 10/8 addresses, and therefore 90% of the demand for new allocations dries up. On the other hand, if the 90% of allocations are going to (large) new entrants, and others with a less homogenous or convertible user base, the demand might not dry up so suddenly. 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. What we haven't established yet is whether this is the same 10% that already had 90% of the allocations (from last century), growing their empire, or new kids on the block. -- Roland Perry
Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit
Thus spake Tom Vest [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Feb 23, 2008, at 1:54 PM, Stephen Sprunk wrote: 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. 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. Thanks for the information Stephen. In order to be perfectly clear on how to interpret this, it would be good to know whether this sum includes the pre-ARIN delegations, or just reflects what has happened since ARIN was established. The wording of the question and response referred only to ARIN members. That does not include most orgs with _only_ legacy allocations, but it would include orgs with both legacy and non-legacy allocations. Presumably, if an org had both types, both would have been included, but that wasn't explicitly stated since it wasn't relevant to the questions I was asking at the time. If you are interested in who those 73 Xtra Large orgs are, you can try asking ARIN. If that level of detail is covered by NDA, you can get a close approximation by mining WHOIS or BGP. S Stephen Sprunk God does not play dice. --Albert Einstein CCIE #3723 God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the K5SSSdice at every possible opportunity. --Stephen Hawking
Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit
On Feb 24, 2008, at 12:45 PM, Stephen Sprunk wrote: Thus spake Tom Vest [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Feb 23, 2008, at 1:54 PM, Stephen Sprunk wrote: 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. 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. Thanks for the information Stephen. In order to be perfectly clear on how to interpret this, it would be good to know whether this sum includes the pre-ARIN delegations, or just reflects what has happened since ARIN was established. The wording of the question and response referred only to ARIN members. That does not include most orgs with _only_ legacy allocations, but it would include orgs with both legacy and non- legacy allocations. Presumably, if an org had both types, both would have been included, but that wasn't explicitly stated since it wasn't relevant to the questions I was asking at the time. Not necessarily. Orgs which are end-users and not LIR/ISP subscriber members may have resources from ARIN without being members. Owen
Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit
On Feb 23, 2008, at 1:54 PM, 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. 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. Thanks for the information Stephen. In order to be perfectly clear on how to interpret this, it would be good to know whether this sum includes the pre-ARIN delegations, or just reflects what has happened since ARIN was established. Then, if the distribution is deemed to be of real significance, e.g., to understand the past, or better understand what to do next, the best/simplest metric for such evaluations is probably the Herfindahl- Hirschman Index (HHI), which attempts to capture both dimensions of concentration/diffusion in a single unidimensional scale. This is probably the most common tool that economists and policymakers use to evaluate such things when necessary (e.g., before approving very large mergers) in other sectors. The standard interpretations for HHI results may not be ideal for this sector, but if one has access to time series data, it does provide a really nice way of evaluating concentration/diffusion trends over time. To my mind, concerns about the distribution of PA are pretty analogous to concerns about the distribution of access to goods in general, while PA+PI together could be interpreted as the distribution of final goods themselves (e.g., think airports or airlines vs. individual passenger-flights). Since we're not talking about goods that are strongly bound to geography, the fact that ARIN members don't all compete for the same kinds of customers or over the same market territories doesn't really matter, as it would in more conventional contexts. More on HHI here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herfindahl_index Bottom line: if people believe that the kind of de facto concentration/diffusion claims that have been circulating are important, a bit more effort should probably be devoted to understanding how to sensibly interpret such things. TV 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... S Stephen Sprunk God does not play dice. --Albert Einstein CCIE #3723 God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the K5SSSdice at every possible opportunity. --Stephen Hawking
Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit
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
Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit
In article [EMAIL PROTECTED], Tom Vest [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes 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? 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? I would not be surprised to learn that consumption in the ARIN region includes all the legacy assignments. 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). In the current context, just because they have received large allocations in the past, does not mean these few dozen ISPs will necessarily need similarly large new ipv4 allocations in future. Operational comment: Look on the bright side, they may follow Comcast's example and deploy ipv6 instead! -- Roland Perry
Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit
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. thanks. randy
RE: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit
Operational comment: Look on the bright side, they may follow Comcast's example and deploy ipv6 instead! Or they may not, and their share price will suffer as a result. People making the technical decision to stick with IPv4 for their large network are also making a decision to limit the growth of the network and to limit the growth of the business. As the IPv4 exhaustion issue becomes more widely understood, companies who have not prepared themselves to deploy IPv6 will find themselves under increasing scrutiny by shareholders. Comcast moved to IPv6 because their network was running out of RFC 1918 space. Since DOCSIS 3 includes IPv6 support, they made the decision to go to IPv6 rather than continue to spend money on shoehorning themselves into the limited IPv4 address space. Many people have not yet come to terms with how big the IPv6 space is, even the /32 that an ISP gets or the /48 that a site gets. We probably need to start talking about the number of subnetting bits available. For instance, an IPv4 ISP who assigns a /24 to subnets within their architecture and who has a /16 allocated for their architecture, has 8 bits available to subnet with. If an IPv6 ISP decides to assign a /64 to subnets and allocate a single /48 then they will also have 8 subnet bits available. So you could consider a /48 to be roughly equivalent to an IPv4 /16. Now, if an IPv6 ISP decides to strictly follow the rule of assigning a /48 per site internally, then each PoP or data center will be allocated a /48 meaning that each PoP or data center now has 8 subnet bits available. This amount of legroom allows you to do things like standardize subnet layouts for all sites, regardless of size, including the actual bits used from the 8 subnet bits. For instance, you can predict that if a PoP has 2001:1918:123/48 you know that if there is a switch connecting to a data center at that site, it will have the IPv6 address 2001:1918:123:d033::1 because your standard design has ::d033/64 assigned to the switch filling that role and Interface ID 1 assigned to its management interface. This kind of standardization makes it much easier to deploy PoPs regardless of whether it is in Dubai, where the data center is a half rack of webservers, or The Dalles where it is a 40,000 square foot warehouse. It also simplifies management and troubleshooting of the network. --Michael Dillon
Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit
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. 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. 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%).
Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit
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
Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit
On Fri, 22 Feb 2008, Roland Perry wrote: I would not be surprised to learn that consumption in the ARIN region includes all the legacy assignments. Many legacy assignments are now administered by the other RIRs http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space Tony. -- f.a.n.finch [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://dotat.at/ WIGHT PORTLAND PLYMOUTH: SOUTHWEST 5 OR 6, OCCASIONALLY 7 IN WIGHT, DECREASING 4 AT TIMES. MODERATE OR ROUGH. OCCASIONAL DRIZZLE. MODERATE OR GOOD, OCCASIONALLY POOR.
Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit
In article [EMAIL PROTECTED], Tony Finch [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes I would not be surprised to learn that consumption in the ARIN region includes all the legacy assignments. Many legacy assignments are now administered by the other RIRs http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space I should have said: ...includes all the legacy assignments in the ARIN region. -- Roland Perry
Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit
On 22 feb 2008, at 16:41, Tom Vest wrote: 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.? Yes. 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. 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... You've got a point there. However, I think many of us will be able to judge ISP size from other factors and observe that the correlation by the such determined ISP size and address use is quite high. To turn things around: does anyone know about a significant amount of address space (say, a block of a million or so or more) going to an entity that isn't an ISP of some sort in the past 5 years?
Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit
Hi Iljitsch, Thanks for your response. On Feb 23, 2008, at 1:38 AM, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote: On 22 feb 2008, at 16:41, Tom Vest wrote: 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.? Yes. 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. 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? 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... You've got a point there. However, I think many of us will be able to judge ISP size from other factors and observe that the correlation by the such determined ISP size and address use is quite high. I agree that many of us can estimate ISP size even more accurately, by looking at the sum of address space originated by well-known ASes associated with those ISPs. I think many of us will recognize that there may be other, less well-known ASes associated with some of these, and so an accounting of the well-known ones is incomplete, perhaps a lower bound. I agree that some of us can correlate the contents of the routing table over time with the entries in the delegated files, to get very loose inter-temporal (delegation- origination) associations, which have been shaped over time in opaque ways by MA, multihoming, customer management and traffic engineering engineering practices, etc. However, I still haven't seen anything that enables one to penetrate this fog of largely unknowable commercial and operational details sufficiently to justify the 90% claim -- or any other claim. 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! Thanks, TV
Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit
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. 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... S Stephen Sprunk God does not play dice. --Albert Einstein CCIE #3723 God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the K5SSSdice at every possible opportunity. --Stephen Hawking
Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit
Thus spake Adrian Chadd [EMAIL PROTECTED] As I ranted on #nanog last night; the v6 transition will happen when it costs more to buy / maintain a v4 infrastructure (IP trading, quadruple NAT, support overheads, v6 tunnel brokers, etc) then it is to migrate infrastructure to v6. If people were sane (!), they'd have a method right now for an enterprise to migrate 100% native IPv6 and interconnect to the v4 network via translation devices. None of this dual stack crap. It makes the heads of IT security and technical managers spin. 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), they'll gradually start converting consumer POPs to 10/8 and reusing the freed blocks for new commercial customers. ISPs without consumer customers to cannibalize addresses from, e.g. hosting shops, will be the main folks needing to buy space on the market. Unfortunately, it's just not possible today for most edge networks to go v6-only and get to the v4 Internet via NAT-PT. WinXP can't do DNS over v6, and earlier versions (which are still in widespread use) can't do v6 at all. The vast majority of home routers/modems can't do v6 either. They'll need NAT-PT eventually so all of those users stuck on v4 can get to new v6-only sites when they appear. Some may offer native v6 as well for people who don't like ISP NAT, but the main complainers will be the heavy P2P users they don't want in the first place, so where's the motivation? Enterprises are a different story entirely; most are already on RFC1918 (or unadvertised class B space) behind their own NAT, and adding PT functionality to it is a simple software update that gives them access to external v6-only sites without touching any of their hosts. Once all their hosts can support it, perhaps in 5-10 years, they'll do a flash cut to v6 on the internal side and reconfigure their PT to reach external v4-only sites. Dual-stack is necessary in the ISP core, definitely, but it's unrealistic at the edge. Most of us living out there went through the hell of running multiple L3 protocols in the 80s and 90s and have no desire to return to it; there's just no ROI for doing it that way vs a simple NAT-PT box. (ObRant: Want v6 to take off? Just give everyone who has a v4 allocation a v6 allocation already. There's enough space to make that happen. I'm philosophically opposed to giving people something they haven't asked for. It's not like it's tough to get IPv6 space; ARIN's rejection rate is something like 2% once you remove the folks that applied for the wrong type. Also, a response from the ARIN Pres/BoT on a similar topic was that it's not ARIN's job to push IPv6 on people, merely to educate them and serve any resulting requests. Giving an IPv6 block to everyone who has an IPv4 block definitely goes against that philosophy. Oh wait, that reduces IRR revenues..) Not at all; at least under the current fee schedule, revenues won't go down until total consumption of IPv4 space is well into a decline, which isn't going to happen for a long time. If that happens by 2020, I'll be pleasantly surprised. S Stephen Sprunk God does not play dice. --Albert Einstein CCIE #3723 God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the K5SSSdice at every possible opportunity. --Stephen Hawking
Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit
(apologies in advance for extending this thread here rather than on ppml -- will gladly take responses off-list, or move it over if responders would prefer to continue the discussion there) On Feb 22, 2008, at 6:22 AM, Stephen Sprunk wrote: Thus spake Adrian Chadd [EMAIL PROTECTED] As I ranted on #nanog last night; the v6 transition will happen when it costs more to buy / maintain a v4 infrastructure (IP trading, quadruple NAT, support overheads, v6 tunnel brokers, etc) then it is to migrate infrastructure to v6. If people were sane (!), they'd have a method right now for an enterprise to migrate 100% native IPv6 and interconnect to the v4 network via translation devices. None of this dual stack crap. It makes the heads of IT security and technical managers spin. 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? 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? Thanks, TV
Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit
On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 07:42:51AM +, Paul Ferguson wrote: I never thought I'd be doing this but: Can we please move this thread elsewhere? - - ferg there is a list already established for just such purposes: List-Id: ARIN Discussion Mailing List arin-discuss.arin.net List-Unsubscribe: http://lists.arin.net/mailman/listinfo/arin-discuss, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] List-Subscribe: http://lists.arin.net/mailman/listinfo/arin-discuss, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] --bill
Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit
You must be a member of ARIN to be on [EMAIL PROTECTED] The proper place for the discussion to go is likely the ARIN Public Policy Mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED]. Regards, -drc On Feb 20, 2008, at 1:41 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 07:42:51AM +, Paul Ferguson wrote: I never thought I'd be doing this but: Can we please move this thread elsewhere? - - ferg there is a list already established for just such purposes: List-Id: ARIN Discussion Mailing List arin-discuss.arin.net List-Unsubscribe: http://lists.arin.net/mailman/listinfo/arin- discuss, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] List-Subscribe: http://lists.arin.net/mailman/listinfo/arin-discuss, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] --bill
RE: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 1. Where is the current demand for IPv4 coming from? Plenty of analysis here. I never thought I'd be doing this but: Can we please move this thread elsewhere? - - ferg -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: PGP Desktop 9.6.3 (Build 3017) wj8DBQFHu9n1q1pz9mNUZTMRAh93AKDSBuNQZqcrXlNOhdytdEYVJDGLRACfSN7k dhZMaUnjtOofL5gsOJ2Db/E= =cMU1 -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- Fergie, a.k.a. Paul Ferguson Engineering Architecture for the Internet fergdawg(at)netzero.net ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/
Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit
It's good that this discussion is happening now. To make the discussion as productive as possible, it's probably a good idea to clarify assumptions and terms. We all know what market means -- but in all likelihood many of the things we all know do not overlap, and some are probably mutually contradictory. If thinking about IPv4 addresses as a commodity has any validity, it comes from the assumption that making them subject to market pricing will increase supply, i.e., incentive current surplus holders to make that surplus available to would-be buyers. In other commodity markets, the connection between market pricing and increased supply is *production* -- i.e., when the revealed price of a commodity goes up, those who are capable of making it are motivated to make more, or to jump into the market for the first time. In other commodity markets, that motivation is bounded by the threat of alternative suppliers, by the impracticality of hoarding, and by the inability of the potential seller to use more of the commodity directly. In other words, the existence or potential emergence of alternative producers/suppliers tends to discourage hoarding to maximize prices (because there's no guarantee that prices will stay high, much less go even higher), and the lack of direct use value reduces any countervailing incentive that the prospective seller to just hold the assets in perpetuity, until they can be used in-house. In the case of IPv4 addressing, none of these bounding conditions apply. No more IPv4 addresses can be produced, and they're almost certain to have unique (if not irreplaceable) use value, at least for some classes of ISPs that exist today, for at least a decade or more (or as long as those kinds of ISPs exist, whichever is shortest). That means the potential price is always going to be higher tomorrow than it is today, right up to the day before the last day that IPv4 becomes useless. Which means hoarding is going to continue to be the most sensible behavior for all surplus holders -- even those that no longer have any Internet-related ops or business interests. This countervailing incentive is much stronger for surplus holders that *do* still have such interests. Knowing that IPv4 addresses that they might need in the future will certainly cost more (maybe lots more) than whatever price they could command for surplus IPv4 today, growing ISPs are not likely to contribute much to the salable, liquid address pool. Worse still, so long as IPv4 continues to be a non-substitutable, must-have input for certain kinds of ISPs, ISPs like that will know that the threat of competition from existing or hypothetical future competitors will be absolutely limited by the availability of IPv4 address space. For them, making IPv4 address space unavailable to competitors is a perfectly sensible use, and one with quite a lot of value. An unmediated market is not going to work, for almost any meaning of that term. Get over it. Anyone who disagrees should point out anything disputable in the above, or else clarify what they actually think/hope that an IPv4 address market will achieve. TV On Feb 19, 2008, at 12:04 PM, Rod Beck wrote: I am not sure it's a perfectly functioning market. The whole point of a market is to penalize the holding excess inventory of IP addresses. There is no penalty today because there is no opportunity cost to holding excess inventory. :) What's amazingly ironic is how the free market guys suddenly vanish when one wants to apply free markets to their industry ... :) Roderick S. Beck Director of European Sales Hibernia Atlantic 1, Passage du Chantier, 75012 Paris http://www.hiberniaatlantic.com Wireless: 1-212-444-8829.
Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit
On Feb 19, 2008, at 5:48 AM, Roderick Beck wrote: Hmm ... There is a market for brownstone apartments in NYC and also for Cezanne's paintings and farmland ... There are plenty of markets that function well despite the absence of 'production'. Not especially illuminating comparisons, but I'm happy to indulge. If access to address resources is nothing more than an aesthetic or status concern, then brownstones and Cezannes are fine comparisons. Farmland is a better comparison, but you're wrong to add it to your list. It is constantly being created, and (more frequently) destroyed, e.g., when forested land is cleared, or countryside gets converted to subdivisions. If you had said land itself, that would be been much more apt, at least if you think about what land meant back in the 19th century and earlier, when it was synonymous with self-determination (in both in economic and political sense). By the way, supply is not production. Supply how much will be offered for sale. Excellent observation. The quantity that can be offered for sale is a subset of the quantity that can be produced. If the latter is open-ended, so the superset is unbounded, then those capable of offering something for sale tend to take that into account when deciding when and for what price to put what they have on offer. Sell now, or someone else will. Sell now, because there's no reason to assume that your terms will be better later. Now try that in reverse. So I am totally unconvinced at this point. By the way, since markets do not involve compulsion. Oh I see. If I had realized that libertarian posturing and not actual problem solving was the impetus for this thread, I wouldn't have bothered to chime in. So why not give it a try? Because some mistakes can take decades or longer to correct. -R. Sent wirelessly via BlackBerry from T-Mobile. -Original Message- From: Tom Vest [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2008 13:26:03 To:nanog@merit.edu Cc:Rod Beck [EMAIL PROTECTED],Iljitsch van Beijnum [EMAIL PROTECTED],David Conrad [EMAIL PROTECTED],Brandon Galbraith [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit It's good that this discussion is happening now. To make the discussion as productive as possible, it's probably a good idea to clarify assumptions and terms. We all know what market means -- but in all likelihood many of the things we all know do not overlap, and some are probably mutually contradictory. If thinking about IPv4 addresses as a commodity has any validity, it comes from the assumption that making them subject to market pricing will increase supply, i.e., incentive current surplus holders to make that surplus available to would-be buyers. In other commodity markets, the connection between market pricing and increased supply is *production* -- i.e., when the revealed price of a commodity goes up, those who are capable of making it are motivated to make more, or to jump into the market for the first time. In other commodity markets, that motivation is bounded by the threat of alternative suppliers, by the impracticality of hoarding, and by the inability of the potential seller to use more of the commodity directly. In other words, the existence or potential emergence of alternative producers/suppliers tends to discourage hoarding to maximize prices (because there's no guarantee that prices will stay high, much less go even higher), and the lack of direct use value reduces any countervailing incentive that the prospective seller to just hold the assets in perpetuity, until they can be used in-house. In the case of IPv4 addressing, none of these bounding conditions apply. No more IPv4 addresses can be produced, and they're almost certain to have unique (if not irreplaceable) use value, at least for some classes of ISPs that exist today, for at least a decade or more (or as long as those kinds of ISPs exist, whichever is shortest). That means the potential price is always going to be higher tomorrow than it is today, right up to the day before the last day that IPv4 becomes useless. Which means hoarding is going to continue to be the most sensible behavior for all surplus holders -- even those that no longer have any Internet-related ops or business interests. This countervailing incentive is much stronger for surplus holders that *do* still have such interests. Knowing that IPv4 addresses that they might need in the future will certainly cost more (maybe lots more) than whatever price they could command for surplus IPv4 today, growing ISPs are not likely to contribute much to the salable, liquid address pool. Worse still, so long as IPv4 continues to be a non-substitutable, must-have input for certain kinds of ISPs, ISPs like that will know that the threat of competition from existing or hypothetical future competitors will be absolutely limited by the availability of IPv4 address space. For them, making IPv4 address space
