Funny Money: 1+1=$50M??

[Valdis.Kletnieks at VT.EDU]

On Sun, 30 Mar 1997 15:22:00 CST, Jim Fleming said:
> You apparently think it will bring $5 million.
> I claim that $50 million is more likely.

Even after we've seen postings from (was it you, Kim?) stating
that if they had billed *LAST* year at the proposed rates, 
they would have taken in $3M or so?

I certainly hope that we *DONT* see $50M in income - this would
imply a total collapse of CIDR, and damned if I know where we're
going to find an upgrade path out of our Cisco 7500's ;)

> 	How much has renumbering cost ISPs over the years ?
> 		As an example, 3,000 ISPs spending $10,000
> 		per year on this nonsense is $30,000,000.

> 		Some ISPs report it costs them $100,000/year.

I'm not sure which way you mean this.  Let's examine both..

(a) ISP's shelling out mucho <economic measurement units> for the
costs of re-numbering... The only comment I can add here is that
any business that gets nailed for $100K in costs one year, and
fails to learn from it and get nailed agai the NEXT year, is
quite deserving of being seperated from their money.

(b) ISP's shelling out mucho <monetary units> for ARIN fees.

Hmm.. How many bits do they get for $10K?  Is there sufficient
remaining unallocated space to allocate 3,000 of those?

Now look at the *size* of the allocation that costs $100K.
(I am at home, and no web-browser handy, but I think the ISP would have to
have 10 seperate /8s to get into this range). Now compute how many of
those you can create out of 32 bits.  Using these 2 numbers, compute an
upper bound on income.

(Actually, I'm surprised nobody did this before - it should be
fairly easy to look at the *current* allocations, compute the
distribution of /8s, /10,s etc down to /19s, take the amount of
currently unallocated space, and figure out what the *maximum*
that ARIN can make if they allocate *ALL* the space.

And remember - if they actually suceed in doing so, we can hang
a very large

'GAME OVER - INSERT IPv6 PACKET TO CONTINUE"

sign on the entire Internet.

				Valdis Kletnieks
				Computer Systems Engineer
				Virginia Tech