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

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

Michael T. Halligan wrote:
>>
>> 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.
> 
> Your train of thought is bizarre. If a customer cannot grow within an 
> ISP, they leave. That is lost revenue.
> 

No true.  Customers of ISP's that regularly grow their own usage of IPv4 
are either ISP's themselves - in which they are in the same boat as you 
- or service providers (webhosters and such) or very large orgs who 
aren't using address translation.  And all of these customers should be 
well aware of the constraints in the global IPv4 supply, and you should 
already be talking to them NOW about their future use, and getting them 
to buy usage of more IPv4 from you now, so that you can get your 
requests going now.  IPv4 runout is only a few more years away.

And I will also point out that once IPv4 runout happens, the large 
consumers of IPv4 will have a VERY limited number of competitors of 
yours to choose from, and those competitors will rapidly start raising 
prices for large blocks of IPv4.

If pricing for a single IP address jumps by, let's say, 100 times, then 
this might only be a $20 a year price increase for an end-user using a 
single IP address.  I'll leave you to do the math for your "growing"
IPv4 customers but it's easy to see that customers who regularly grow
their IPv4 usage, particularly by large amounts, are going to be among 
the first to be severely crimped after runout occurs.

They will pass their shortages and price increases down to their users, 
just as you are doing to them.  They also will be much more aggressive 
about pushing address translation and you will see address translation 
appearing in places it didn't before.

For example most college dormitories hand out public IPv4 to their 
students in the form of ethernet connections.  That's probably going to 
be some of the first "gimmies" to disappear.  The students will get 
private addresses for free, not public.

Ted