[arin-ppml] Draft Policy 2012-4: Return to 12 Month Supply and Reset Trigger to /8 in Free Pool

[George Bonser]

Another reason for the reduction in burn rate may have nothing to do with going from 12 month to 3 month allocations.  Think about it ... there SHOULD be NO change in burn rate over a 12 month period.  If I need a /19 every three months then I am going to need them every three months whether I get them once a year in a larger block or not.  The frequency of having to go to ARIN does not change the growth rate of a service requiring IP addresses.  So the notion that going from 12 month supply to 3 month supply having greatly reduced the consumption of address resources seems odd to me.

What is more likely are things like the largest consumers of public IP space (mobile networks, for example) going to IPv6 internally in their networks and using NAT64/DNS64 CGN to interface devices to the v4 Internet.

There are an increasing number of native v6 devices out there on an increasing number of networks in the mobile space.  This is reducing the amount of v4 addresses burned up in these mobile networks.  VZW, for example, has a large number of native v6 devices these days and as old devices are retired and people upgrade to new ones, the number is increasing with every passing day.

That space is just one example where consumption of v6 addresses are in decline.  My v6 traffic is increasing with each passing month.  I would currently estimate that of all clients able to connect to my network for service, about 1% are currently native v6 (I'll know with more precision at the end of this month).  Of the newer clients, 100% are v6 capable and nearly 100% are on a v6 native network with some carriers.

The reason for reduction in burn rate isn't because of the interval in requesting resources.  Growth is not modulated by frequency of contacting ARIN.  I would posit that the reason for burn rate reduction in IPv4 is that we are seeing more widespread adoption of v6 in internal networks by large consumers of address space than people realize.  We don't see the corresponding increase in v6 traffic on the internet because we don't see service providers moving their primary landing pages to v6 yet.  For many you still need to provide a "special" hostname to get their v6 service and most people aren't going to bother with that.  So much of the traffic is being NATed to v4 at the network provider's internet edge.