[arin-discuss] urgency of IPv6

Thu Jun 24 16:21:06 EDT 2010

On 6/24/2010 12:48 PM, Nathaniel B. Lyon wrote:
> 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.
>

ARIN has been picking that fruit for many years, most if not all of
those /8's were traded in a long time ago.

ANY entity that is GROWING and obtaining additional allocations
MUST be at 80% utilization, that's a requirement of getting more
numbers.  But 80% utilization includes the notion that an ISP
customer can get a /29 with little justification, and few ISP's
charge customers more money who need more numbers - unless those
customers are only paying a pittance for connectivity in the
first place (ie: broadband).

The other unspoken assumption here is that ALL ISP's that are
obtaining IP addressing are growing.  But the fact is that growth
is not a business requirement for profit.

Unfortunately in business over the last 40 years in the investment
community there has been a trend for companies to stop paying
dividends and this forces the stockholders to only realize any kind
of investment income from stock by selling the stock.  Thus, they
want the stock prices to go up, and that only happens if the company
is getting bigger.  So the general public (and a lot of poorly-educated
businessmen I'm afraid) have this notion that businesses aren't
doing well and aren't profitable unless they are growing.

Some of the smarter ones of these people have very recently pulled
their heads out as a result of the economic depression of 2007-2008
but the unfortunate fact is that the ARIN rules on IP assignments
were made right during the height of this misguided belief.  ARIN
figured they could exert all the control they would ever need over
the IPv4-holding community by keeping control of new assignments.
No concern or thought was given to auditing existing holdings - note
that section 3.6.1 was only added to the NRPM quite recently, for
example, and the Legacy RSA (LRSA) was also another recent invention
along the same vein.

To it's credit there's been a mental shift at ARIN and within the
ARIN community, all of us I think have come to the understanding
that ARIN will be managing IPv4 long after IANA stops handing it out.
Thus there's a need for more IPv4 control mechanisms than just being
the gatekeeper of new IPv4 assignments.  IPv6, of course, is so
vast that we really COULD give everyone and their dog an allocation,
many many times over, thus the control issues are much different.
With IPv6, the critical thing is making sure we know who has what,
since there's so many numbers.

 > 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?
 >

I believe that with the exception of the true hacker admins, and
the very large professional admins at huge networks, that for the
rest IPv6 adoption will mainly be driven by customer demand for
Ipv6.  And that will be only driven by content providers offering
content in IPv6 ONLY.  Not dual-stacked content, IPv6 ONLY content.

Ted

>
> -----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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