[ARIN-consult] [arin-announce] Fee Schedule Change Consultation

[Owen DeLong]

On Nov 20, 2012, at 7:30 AM, Charles Gucker <cgucker at onesc.net> wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 10:21 AM, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
>> On Nov 20, 2012, at 6:39 AM, Robert E. Seastrom <rs at seastrom.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> Why not?  I should think that the ability to turn into a smaller ISP
>>> by handing back or otherwise divesting oneself of (legacy, IPv4)
>>> address space is something that you, of all people, would heartily
>>> support.
>>> 
>> 
>> Because there are a lot of ISPs that have /32s and are too large to be
>> considered X-Small. The difference between a /36 and a /32 is quite
>> significant and I'd hate to see all the truly X-Small providers suffering
>> a fee increase to subsidize the /32 holdings of a significant number of
>> small organizations that really shouldn't be X-Small.
> 
> This would only be true if the ISP in question returns all (almost all
> of) their IPv4 space.    Their "size" is not measured based on their
> IPv6 space allotments, but rather IPv4 whereby the X-Small provider is
> having their "size" based on IPv6 and not IPv4, although practical
> usage is quite different.    I'm personally a lot more of a fan of
> making a /32 X-Small in IPv6 and let the IPv4 allotments make up the
> rate scale difference.
> 

I believe that is a much more temporary solution than many people think.

I believe that the financial disincentives for maintaining IPv4 (of which
this would become yet another one) will drive rapid deprecation of IPv4 by
ISPs once IPv6 reaches critical mass and you will see what little IPv4
support they continue to provide to their customers come at a premium price
using a small number of heavily NATted addresses.

I suspect this is probably around 5-7 years from now, possibly sooner.

Owen