[arin-discuss] Food for thought: IPv4 accountability.

[Gerald Bove]

I usually try to keep quite and read, but I must disagree with this.

1) No one runs an ISP for the fun of it, they do it to make money. Maybe making money off doing something they enjoy, but not purely for the fun of it. Anyone who tells you different is lying. 

2) No ISP can stop selling service and expect to survive, if even only for a couple months. A basic business rule says if your not growing, your dying. 

Every ISP knows that when your smaller, you have to hedge your bets so to speak. You pay more for transit then you would like because you know the more clients you take on, the less the total cost works out to be. 

Any ISP that can live for any extended amount of time without taking on new clients has either stopped upgrading and improving their network (which is sure death in this day and age), or have won the Internet.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not in the "sky is falling" camp personally. Yes the transition is going to be hard, yes its going to get even harder as time goes by, but this is hardly "news", we all knew this was coming.

Our best bet at the moment is for us all to implement IPv6 (as been mentioned by many people already), and take a real good look at our own IPv4 usage, not just the big dogs. Maybe its time for us all to start really implementing the terms on our IP Justification forms. When was the last time you took a good look at all your clients with /28's and bigger? Do you really need to give EVERY client a /29?

All this talk about extending IPv4 is just a band-aid, not a solution. A solution would be a conversation on how to really push IPv6 implementation.

-----Original Message-----
From: arin-discuss-bounces at arin.net [mailto:arin-discuss-bounces at arin.net] On Behalf Of Ted Mittelstaedt
Sent: Wednesday, July 22, 2009 2:55 PM
To: Breault Jonathan
Cc: ARIN Discussion List
Subject: Re: [arin-discuss] Food for thought: IPv4 accountability.

Ultimately it boils down to the following:

Current customers of ISP's all have an IPv4 address assigned.

There will come a point for ALL ISP's whether they are /8 holders or small ones, where they won't have any more IPv4 than what they already have handed out to existing customers.  There won't be any more IPv4, either from begging ARIN or buying it from someone else, no matter how much you are willing to pay.

At that point, NEW customers of those ISP's will be told that they either have to do IPv6 or nothing.

For a period of time, those new customers will probably go to other ISPs that still have IPv4.

But eventually, ALL ISP's will be out of IPv4 and those new customers will have to take IPv6 or nothing.

So, if your a growing ISP and you have lots of unused IPv4 you will be able to grow for a longer time than a competitor who has a little amount of unused IPv4.  You benefit and your competitor who has a small amount of IPv4 unused will lose out - BUT they will ONLY lose out on GROWTH.

In other words, if your a small ISP and YOUR MAKING MONEY then the
IPv4 runout merely means that while your out-of-IPv4, your competitors will simply make more and more money than you.  It doesn't mean that you will start LOSING money.  You will make the same money you have always made.  If your feeding yourself and your family, then you will continue to do so.

Eventually, when there's no more ISP's that have IPv4 to give out, then customers will be forced to take IPv6 - and you will be able to pick up growing from where you left off.

I think the problem here is that so many people in the ISP business are assuming that growth is only going to happen by stealing customers. 
Meaning, that if my competitors are growing, it's because they are taking customers away from me, and I'm getting smaller.

I humbly submit here that IPv4 depletion isn't going to work this way. 
Just because you can't give IPv4 to new customers, because you have run out, doesn't mean that your going to lose any existing ones.  And if you do lose an existing customer then you will be back in the game and have
IPv4 to hand out that your existing customer was using.

Thus, I don't buy the fairness arguments I see here.  ISPs need to concentrate on making their existing customers happy with their service
- that's how you keep from losing customers.  And ISP's need to take the long view and realize that the period of time after they have run out of
IPv4 and while all their other competitors are still giving out IPv4 is going to be a lot shorter than they think.

Some of these small ISP's complaining are are like a small restaurant owner located in town who has an established clientele that likes his food and is keeping him going, who wants to throw all that away so that he can grow to the size of a Burger King or McDonalds, and have a clientele who hates eating his food, and only goes there because they are forced to by their kids who are demanding Happy Meals.

So, as an ISP owner you would rather have customers who hate you but are with you because your the only game in town with IPv4?  May I ask why your even in the ISP business in the first place?  Do you even LIKE the Internet?  Or is it nothing more than a convenient mechanism to make money for you, and you would be just as happy selling life insurance policies or something?

Think about it.

Ted

Breault Jonathan wrote:
> Basically, I think the problem is that once you hold a resource from 
> arin, you only need to justify when you request new resources... I 
> think there is missing a policy that would allow ARIN to ask every 3-5 
> years for justification on the resources' usage and take action on the 
> blocks that have a too small Usage Ratio.
> 
> The question we all need to ask is, do we really want to produce 
> justification on regular basis?
> 
> What should we do with weak isp's?
> 
> Going after the big historical allocation might be a way to release 
> some ip blocks. But it can also affect people with smaller blocks ... 
> Maybe we should give an incentive to holders of /20 that use 2 C 
> classes on it so they just move to a /22 ...
> 
> Maybe somebody on the list has ideas on how something like that can be 
> achieved without being unfair for others...
> 
> 
> jonathan
> 
> Le 22/07/09 12:10 PM, « John Curran » <jcurran at arin.net> a écrit :
> 
>> On Jul 22, 2009, at 11:36 AM, Plimpton Ben wrote:
>>
>>> John
>>>
>>> If this were the case, once a smaller ISP had met your routing 
>>> criteria, shouldn't we all then be able to request IP's based on 
>>> what our needs will be for the next few months and not have to 
>>> justify our previous allocations.
>> Ben - ARIN doesn't have routing criteria.  ARIN does have policies 
>> set by the community which require an ISP to be able to justify a 
>> minimum size block before being able to come directly to ARIN for an allocation.
>> Once you meet that minimum address requirement, you can come to ARIN.
>>
>>> I'm guessing that at some point, organizations with large 
>>> allocations have made requests for additional space without having 
>>> to justify the usage on their other blocks or else this wouldn't be 
>>> an issue b/c they would have filled them up already and the rest of 
>>> the community wouldn't feel that they're squatting on their previous 
>>> allocations.
>> Everytime you come for an additional allocation, you have to show 
>> utilization of your existing address blocks.  This applies to equally 
>> to all requesters.
>>
>> The concern expressed is that there are some folks who hold large 
>> historically allocations of address space which do not come in at all 
>> for additional allocations, and hence never have to show their usage.
>>
>> /John
>>
>> John Curran
>> President and CEO
>> ARIN
>>
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