[ppml] IPv4 "Up For Grabs" proposal [MORE]

[John Curran]

It just occurred to me that my response was to a message that was
part of a policy proposal discussion.  I have no opinion whatsoever on
the particular policy proposal; I just wanted to make sure that the
particular issue with "just staying with IPv4" was clear.

/John

At 9:08 AM -0400 7/10/07, John Curran wrote:
>At 7:38 AM -0500 7/10/07, James Hess wrote:
>>In that case, ISPs ultimately reclaim public addresses not used for servers,
>>make customers pay dearly for each public IP, and resolve the problem of IPv4
>>exhaustion by reducing the number of public IP addresses that are justifiable
>>for any user of address space, to a small number of hosts that are used for
>>operating well-known services to the public.
>
>James -
> 
>   Your suggestion (just continue to use IPv4, with smaller and
>   smaller assignments to end-sites) works fine, at least for the
>   immediate future.  It not only delays depletion of IPv4, it also
>   reduces the routing entries per new end-site.
>
>   The challenge is that once there is not readily available new
>   blocks of IPv4 space for the ISP's, they will need to explore
>   new avenues to obtain new IPv4 to connect new customers.
>   Some approaches (such as nicely asking your own customers
>   with extra PA space to return it, or mining your network for
>   unused 'stranded' space) work just fine and don't cause global
>   impact.  Some of the approaches (getting really big presently
>   unannounced IPv4 address blocks from parties which forgot
>   they were supposed to return them) also work with effectively
>   the same global routing impact as today's system.
>
>   However, there will be a natural tendency for providers of such
>   big address space to make it into smaller blocks, since many
>   smaller sales (particularly as scarcity increases) could be far
>   more lucrative than the one big transfer.  Further, there will
>   be a tendency to start mining IPv4 space from areas with
>   even smaller potential return (such as unused space in ARIN
>   PI or other ISP PA end-site assignments).   Unfortunately,
>   as the pressure to continue to connect customers increases,
>   these approaches become inevitable, and result in enormous
>   load on the global routing system, leading eventually to nearly
>   one to one ratio in new global routes to new customers.  At
>   that point, it really doesn't matter if super backbone routers
>   can do 500,000, 1M, 5M, or 10M routes, they're not going
>   to keep up with a one-customer/one-global-route scenario.
>
>   If you've got a way to keep IPv4 running, and still maintain
>   the enough hierarchy to keep global routing running, then
>   it's time to enter the spotlight and share the secret.  There
>   is no doubt that its so much easier for us all to stay on IPv6
>   then to move to IPv4, we just don't know how to do it, and
>   still keep the Internet running.
>
>/John
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