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

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

rob servis 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.
>>
> 
> At first blush, I would have agreed with Ted.  For many small to medium
> sized ISPs --- growth re-assignments to commercial end users are mostly
> limited to very large customers who really need their own IP space.  It is
> not very common for customers with small /29 or /28s to come back and need
> more IPs.
> 
> However, the biggest need for IP growth is the shift from very efficient
> dialup --- where there is a 6:1 or better ratio between customers and IPs to
> the broadband world (cable, DSL, wireless) where you only have a 1:1 ratio.
> In that case we do lose revenue if we don't have IPs to assign to DSL pools.
> We don't have an upgrade path to convert those dialups to DSL or wireless if
> we are out of IPs.  We lose money if we can't keep converting the same $$$
> from dialup to broadband.
> 

I don't see this as much of a problem.  We have both dialup and DSL 
customers, we've been selling DSL since Feb. 2001 and we have been 
marketing DSL to our customers ever since then.  All of our competitors 
have been doing this to their dialup customer base as well.  The 
customers remaining on dialup are either stuck in areas where they have 
no broadband and dialup is the only thing available, or they are 
least-cost customers who cannot find a neighbors open wireless network 
that they can scam free service off of.

If I felt that there was much chance of shifting them to broadband I 
would consider IPv4 runout a boon, since I could create a marketing 
campaign that would essentially state that if they don't shift right 
now, that they would not be guaranteed a public IPv4 address in the 
future.  But I think that would be a waste as these folks generally 
wouldn't know an IP address from a postal address, and when they 
eventually do shift, I can simply charge them $2 more a month for a 
"public" address vs a "private" address and I am certain that just about 
all of them would go for the private address - and wouldn't know the 
difference.

The end users who do care are the ones who want to remotely access their 
machine, or online game or whatever, and they all switched to broadband 
years ago.

Of our DSL customers, easily 90% of them run DSL modem/router CPE 
devices that do NOT have ANY ports forwarded and run NAT already within 
the device - these folks are effectively on private numbers now, at 
least, on the PC's that they have plugged into their CPE's.

Of course, it does get a bit ridiculous to have CPE's that are 
translators on translated IP numbers on the DSL network, but I don't 
think it would be much different than customers who put a Linksys
address translator behind a DSL CPE that's running translation now.  And 
I run into probably one of those every couple of weeks, completely 
oblivious to the fact that they are double-natting.


Ted