I recently returned from the APNIC meeting in Auckland, New Zealand. Here are a few notes and highlights from the meeting.
IPv4 Transfer Panel
A interactive panel on current trends in the IPv4 transfer market.
Alain Duran (ICANN Research) – IPv4 market might be considered concentrated depending on how you slice the data. The RIRs are reporting transfers in different formats and different fields and this is hindering analysis. Most transfers are happening in the region, but some are moving between the regions (ARIN is a net exporter). Most of the addresses that are being transferred are “old” ones that were issued more than 20 years ago. (copy)
Geoff Huston (APNIC) – The largest transfers are happening in the ARIN region. More than 58M addresses were transferred globally in 2015. There is a difference between what we see in the routing table for transfers vs. what is recorded in the registry. We don’t have a good way to measure the amount of addresses that are being Leased/Rented. We also can’t measure how many devices are behind NATs. Transfers aren’t making a difference in the route-table growth. (copy)
Sandra Brown (IPv4 Market Group) – Sandra that price will still rise, but is currently being depressed due to the large blocks (/8’s) coming to market. Price differentials between regions have largely disappeared since inter-RIR transfers have started with RIPE. Using the /16 as a base size block, pricing bottomed out in Sept 2015 at about $5/IPv4 address and is now in the $7-8 range for /16s. (copy)
Gabe Fried (HilcoStreambank) – Only 1/3 of large “Elephant” transactions have been recorded with the registry. Smaller blocks command price premiums, so some holders are choosing to break up their blocks and slowly sell them over the course of a year generating additional value to the current block holder. Largest transactions (Option Agreements): Buyer pays at closing, seller keeps the block until the buyer is ready to transfer, buyer retains the right to direct the seller to transfer the blocks to a specific receiver at a future time. 10% of the volume of addresses are direct transfers constituting 96% of transfer transactions. The remaining 4% of the transactions are 90% of the address transfer volume. (copy)
Q&A period included discussions about how Letters of Authority (LOAs) are being used to route blocks. Organizations should really check to see if people are really authorized to advertise blocks. There was some discussion about if reassignment records be used to record renting and leasing records? How can we bring more transparency to the industry for options contracts and leasing/renting issues.
Address policy working group (Policy sig)
All formal action items were resolved before the meeting; 2 policies were implemented recently: Prop-113 & Prop-114
Prop-113 – new minimum assignment criteria, for a /24
- Currently multihomed
- Currently using a /24 and intends to multihome
- Plans to multihome with 6 months
Prop-114 – new ASN assignment criteria
- Currently multihomed OR have previous allocated PI space and intend to multihome in the future
2 new proposals submitted were not accepted by chairs:
First proposal submitted allowed aggregation of /21 approvals instead of /22 from 103/8 and /22 from other pool.
Second proposal submitted required whois contact email should be validated once per month.
Prop-105 – IANA returns pool – allows an organization to get another /22
The IANA returns pool is depleting. The non-103/8 pool is for a second /22 per organization. The pool will deplete soon likely in April/May 2016. March will add a /15. September will add an /18. Recovered blocks, if any, go into this pool as well. When the pool depletes, it’s going to bounce a few times as it gets repeatedly depleted and then refilled. Secretariat proposed at the Jakarta meeting the creation of a waiting list for this pool. The staff has started working on implementation of the wait-list which will be based on a strict order of request.
BGP route Hijacking
Interesting presentation about blocks that are being hijacked and the methods (fraudulently prepared LOAs) to get the blocks routed. Don’t trust LOAs, they are sometimes not worth the “paper” they are written on.
BGP Hijack Issue on Nov 6 2015
Some hijackings are causing a race to the bottom of announcing everything as /24s in some cases. This could have longer-term issues if this type of behavior became the norm rather than a transient exception.
vizAS
APNIC has a new tool that one can use to visualize ASN data.