[arin-ppml] An article of interest to the community....

[John Curran]

On Aug 31, 2011, at 2:18 PM, Seth Mattinen wrote:

> If one is auctioning IPv4 address space, wouldn't it be safe to say it's
> unused? Wouldn't (non-legacy) unused space normally just be returned to
> ARIN?

Seth - 
 
   Hypothetical Small College received a /16 from ARIN in order
   to put all their offices and dorms on the Internet in 1998.
  
   Recently, they've realized that they probably requested too 
   much space long ago, and have also not used in efficiently 
   (due to reserving significant fixed sized address blocks for 
   each and every building on campus.)  The good news is they've 
   figured  out how to overlap multiple address blocks on single 
   network segments (which they had to learn one the first huge
   building appeared), and have a plan which would let them redo
   the entire campus to fit in single /19 address block, or maybe
   an /18 total (with another /19 reserved for long-term growth. 

   Alas,  because of the renumbering involved, they'd need to 
   bring in a lot of help one weekend, and spend probably $25K
   to $50K getting it done. If they can somehow renumber, free 
   up the "extra" space, and end up another $150K to let them 
   buy a new 10gig core switch, then it's a big win overall...

   Is their space unused?  They can't possibly free it up 
   without first doing a significant amount of effort, but 
   they have every reason to list some portion of their IP
   block for auction (as long as they are clear about the
   timing on delivery.)

Thoughts?
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN