[arin-ppml] fair warning: less than 1000 days lefttoIPv4 exhaustion

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net [mailto:arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net] On
Behalf Of Bill Darte
> Sent: Sunday, May 04, 2008 2:30 PM
> To: Geoff Huston; Paul Vixie
> Cc: ppml at arin.net
> Subject: Re: [arin-ppml] fair warning: less than 1000 days lefttoIPv4
exhaustion


> Please no one disabuse the messenger....

> Geoff disclaims certainty in the 1000 days scenario...and of course most
clear see the numbers and > estimates for what they are.

> But, given that we can see the bottom of the pool and + or - 1 1/2 years,
it's 3....then that
> should offer very little consolation to those who think 3 is concrete.

> The range 1.5-4.5 is perhaps scarier....

To whom?

You know the interesting thing about this is that the ONLY people who are
scared about IPv4 runout are those who have a GROWING need for IP addresses.

Not all ISPs out there have this.  Some ISP's are not growing, they are
shrinking.
Others are neither growing nor shrinking but are steady state.  Some have a
lot
of wasted IPv4 internally due to allocation schemes that no longer matched
the
current reality.  Reminds me of a customer we had at one time on a 56k line
from
a time period of something like 1994 to 2005 - after the initial 2 year
contract
was up with them, they went month-to-month and from that point on refused to
resign a contract - we were charging them around $300 a month for a 56k
point
to point circuit and we did so for 11 years - their hangup?  We had assigned
them
a /24 of IPv4 (199.248.255.x) and they did not want to renumber out of it,
and
they even had a firewall and none of these numbers were accessible from the
outside.  Do you think we would have ever sent them a letter saying we were
forcing them to renumber?  Hell no!  I'll take $300 for a 56k dedicated line
any day.
And to top it off the subnet itself is currently in limbo-land, unused,
unadvertised,
and will likely never be corrected since the admin contact on it is on a
domain
for an out-of-business company that's currently held by a speculator.

I'm quite sure there's a lot of ISP's out there that over the years have had
stuff like this going on - they are satisfying their internal growth needs
by
more efficient utilizations.  IPv4 runout isn't going to immediately affect
these organizations.

>From my seat by the fire the orgs that are going to be screwed are the ones
that have very rapidly growing networks that consume enormous numbers of IP
addresses.  And those orgs are the ones that have the bulk of the IPv4 tied
up, in my opinion.  When IPv4 runout happens, they will be forced to go to
IPv6
since there will be no other answer for them - they won't be able to "buy"
on the open market sufficient IPv4 to meet their needs, even if there was
an "IPv4 market".  And once they switch over to IPv6, why then the IPv4 that
they discard will go back to the RIRs - and be available for hand-out again.
It won't be in blocks large enough to satisfy these kinds of orgs, but it
will be in blocks large enough to satisfy the needs of the smaller orgs.

Ted