[arin-ppml] quantitative study of IPv4 address market

[Christoph Blecker]

On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 10:29 AM, Mike Burns <mike at nationwideinc.com> wrote:
> I think Milton's analysis was ingenious and the fact that more than a year
> out Microsoft is routing less than 9,000 out of the 660,000 addresses
> purchased from Nortel all but puts the lie to the idea that an accurate
> justification was made.
> The idea that Microsoft paid $7.5 million because their need was so acute
> that processing successive 3-month justifications from the free pool would
> be too risky is ludicrous when viewing the paucity of routed addresses more
> than 12 months out.
> There are over 17 million RFC 1918 addresses that can be privately used!
>
> Can anybody speculate on a valid justification for the delivery of 660,000
> addresses required to be used within a year, with 98% of them to be
> unrouted?
>
> It's laughable.
>
> My interpretation is that ARIN staff knew that with the privacy rights
> attending to the LRSA and the needs test, they could bluster their way
> through.
> I don't think they considered the kind of post-hoc analysis Milton
> performed, and are gnashing their teeth at Microsoft for so obviously
> showing them up.
>
> Kudos to Prof. Mueller for pulling back the curtain a bit.
>
> Regards,
>
> Mike Burns

Using Microsoft as a yard stick to compare other companies to isn't
really a fair assessment. They've actually been fairly open and have
spoken at recent conferences such as NANOG 55 and IETF 84 about how
their re-architecting their massive data centres. They ran out of
private AS numbers, so they have an active Internet-Draft
(draft-mitchell-idr-as-private-reservation-01) to get some more
private ASNs reserved in 4-byte AS space.

I honestly have little doubt that while these blocks may not be
routed, that doesn't mean they are not in use.

Cheers,
Christoph