[arin-ppml] Stepping forward, opening my mouth and removing all doubt about

[Howard, W. Lee]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net 
> [mailto:arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net] On Behalf Of Stephen Sprunk
> OTOH, there are several large companies that have legacy As, 
> which currently have no incentive to return them to ARIN.  
> Many could renumber into a /16 or less, using NAT, if only 
> they had the financial motivation to incur that cost; ditto 

How many?
Is it fair to assume governments don't have financial motivation
(specifically US, UK or German governments)?
Is it fair to assume that large ISPs could not be sufficiently
motivated to renumber their customers from Class A to /16s
(specifically Level 3, AT&T, Cogent, Japan Inet)?  
If I make those assumptions, how much do you think it would take
to get these remaining organizations to renumber into a block 
justifiable under current rules:
IBM
Xerox
HP
DEC
Apple
MIT
Ford
CSC
Halliburton
MERIT
Eli Lily
Amateur Radio operators
Interop
Prudential
duPont
Cap Debis
Merck
SITA


I haven't looked up the number of employees at each one, and MIT
and MERIT are arguably unmotivated by financial incentives.  That's
18 Class A's that could be renumbered, which assuming current 
demand trends means ARIN would run out of IPv4 space in mid-2012.


> for the hundreds of companies sitting on multiple Bs that 
> could renumber into a /24 if motivated.  However, that still 
> only buys us another year or two at current growth rates...

Exactly.   Though I can't say what level of efficiency is even
theoretically possible with Class B space.

> Plus, I don't hear many folks here being sympathetic to the 
> big ISPs in the first place, since they're the ones consuming 
> most of the address space and causing problems for the rest 
> of us. 

Most of "the rest of us" (on the Internet, not on PPML) get our
address space from those ISPs.  

> These ISPs have the market power to force their 
> vendors to support IPv6, which would trickle down to the 
> smaller players, but so far there's been little visible 
> motion on that front.  

It wouldn't be visible, would it?  It would be Jason Schiller
beating up on Cisco and Juniper in private meetings, saying,
"You have to support IPv6 in hardware."  Actually, that was in
public.  It would be TWC and Comcast updating DOCSIS and giving
orders to settopbox vendors supporting IPv6.  

Huh.  Which vendors need to be pushed by ISPs to support IPv6?
Name names and let's coordinate a campaign on their product
marketing departments.

> They're the ones that are going to be 
> hit the hardest in the coming crunch, given their rates of 
> consumption, so they _have_ to go to IPv6 with NAT-PT (or 
> multi-layered IPv4 NAT) in the near future.  Once they do, 
> though, they could return most of their IPv4 space, which 
> would eliminate the address space depletion problem for the 
> rest of the community...

I don't believe that.
A) Some stuff works poorly through address translation.  One
support call blows the profit margin on that customer.
B) I find it unlikely that existing customers would  be
renumbered into IPv6.  I would expect new customers only.
C) I doubt address space would be returned.  I would expect it
to be used for translations and for those users who needed IPv4
for some reason.  Don't know what that reason would be.

This is clearly my own personal opinion and shouldn't even need
disclamation.

Lee