[arin-discuss] urgency of IPv6

[Nathaniel B. Lyon]

I have a question, and I apologize if this has been asked before.  We are in the process of changing out one of our upstream's with another carrier.  That carrier (I won't name names) said to me, "you can have as many IP's (IPv4) as you want, as long as you can show justification".  I of course said no we have our own direct allocations from ARIN, thanks though.

This got me thinking.  I understand ARIN is running on empty when it comes to IPv4 addresses.  What percentage is the ISP/Carrier community at?  Meaning if you take all the IP's that ARIN has handed out to all the ISP's, carrier's and etc, what utilization percentage would that be at?  Is it 60%, is it 80%?  I know way back in the day, some entities were given /8's and are nowhere near even coming close to utilizing them.  

Could it be that some of these entities have more than enough IPv4 addresses to last a while?  Could that be why adoption is slow to go from a crawl to a walk, to a run?


-----Original Message-----
From: arin-discuss-bounces at arin.net [mailto:arin-discuss-bounces at arin.net] On Behalf Of Ted Mittelstaedt
Sent: Thursday, June 24, 2010 2:20 PM
To: arin-discuss at arin.net
Subject: Re: [arin-discuss] urgency of IPv6



On 6/24/2010 9:30 AM, Lee Howard wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message
> ----
>> From: Leo Bicknell<bicknell at ufp.org>
>> Subject: Re: [arin-discuss] fee waivers
>>
>
>> Lastly, it seems to me a lot of
>> folks want to force IPv6 adoption
>> in a faster time frame, for reasons I do
>> not understand.  There's
>> an urgency to cajole others into doing IPv6
>> sooner, but I have no
>> idea for what end.  People will do it when they
>> need it, stop trying
>> to manipulate them into doing it sooner, no one likes
>> that.
>>
>> IPv6 will happen, on it's own schedule.  Take a deep
>> breath.
>
> Once an organization is unable to receive allocations of
> IPv4 from ARIN, it will have to either stop the business
> requiring new addresses, use IPv6, or lean on an
> address market, NAT444, dual-stack lite, or AFT
> (possibly in combination with IPv6).

I believe many organizations can self-fulfill their own
IPv4 address requests.

For example a customer of ours just got a T1 from Verizon
back east. (out of our service area) It was delivered with
a /29 and IP Unnumbered on the serial link.  I have helped
this customer get T1's before from Verizon and they have
always been delivered with a public /30 on the serial link.

It's easy to see that if Verizon were to convert 2 T1's going
to customers to IP Unnumbered, that they would produce a
/29 that they could use for a new customer.  Thus they can
self-fulfill IPv4 to increase their T1 customer base by
1/3 again the size that it is today.  Or they could get
even more radical and assign a /30 by default for the ethernet
interface of their customers router (with the expectation that the 
customer would use a NAT or some such) and thus harvesting could
double the size of their customer base.

(incidentally, in this customers case I split the /29 and
used half of it internally within the router on a loopback
interface so I could reach the router from the outside and
manage it remotely, but that's another story)

Now I'm not saying Verizon has done anything wrong or illegal
or bad network practice or any of that, with their prior
assignments.

Yes I agree that harvesting IPv4 from infrastructure is
going to be difficult for many orgs.  But the fact is that
this IPv4 is there, it exists within the infrastructure, and
to harvest it merely requires the ISP to talk to the
customer and work something out.  I've renumbered customers
before on my ISP when we got our allocation and there were
a lot, and the renumbering took a year, and there were still
issues a few years later.  But, time solves those things.

Also, I believe that the IPv6/IPv4 implications are going
to be felt differently in the United States vs the rest of the
world.  As this is an English-language mailing list I suspect
the majority of posters are from the US.  In the US the ISP
market is at saturation, it has matured and nobody is really
growing unless someone else is shrinking.  It is inevitable that
the shrinking orgs are going to either release IPv4 back to
ARIN to save money, or sell Legacy on the commercial transfer
market.

I can easily imagine a scenario where the rest of the world
ends up moving to IPv6 and sells it's IPv4 back to ISP's in
the US via the transfer market.  That would probably satisfy
the IP addressing needs of the US for many years.  And it
really wouldn't make much difference to most Ma and Pa Kettle
SOHO and residential customers in the US who's Internet experience
consists mainly of accessing Hulu, Ebay, and CNN, since clearly
the content providers are going to be the very last ones to
go to IPv6-only.  I'm not saying this is optimal by any
means.

Ted

> A market is likely
> to be messy, and in several scenarios leads to filtering,
> such that there are hosts unable to reach other hosts on
> the Internet.  The other mechanisms break some
> applications.
>
> Until all hosts use IPv6, IPv6 also has an unreachability
> problem.  Therefore, the organization with unmet IPv4
> need is likely to have connectivity problems, until
> everyone else supports IPv6.  This causes some people
> concern, and is why some people are encouraging others
> to start now.
>
> This is not a Board position, just a Lee Howard position.
>
> Lee
>
>
>
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