IP Address News

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IP Address News - Providing you with a single site about IP Addresses News and Usage

Category Archives: IPv4

Study on IPv4 transfer market

The Internet Governance Project has released a study regarding the first IPv4 market transfers.

This report discusses what is known about the IPv4 market transfers which have occurred since the implementation of specified transfers within the ARIN, RIPE, and APNIC region.  The report brings together a number of sources to come up with the a total of 83 transactions representing 204 blocks for a total of 6 million IPv4 addresses traded between 2009 and the first half of 2012.

The data for IPv4 market transactions is obscured, however, due to the lack of transparency for all transactions.  While many have called for additional transparency, full transparency seems unlikely given the current constraints of the RIRs and the lack of other compelling regulations which would require disclosure of IPv4 market transactions.

As expected, the source of most of the transferred blocks are legacy IPv4 holders in the ARIN region.  The authors seem surprised that the majority of the transfers occurred in the ARIN region.  Given the expected supply for the IPv4 transfer market was expected to come from legacy IPv4 holders (who are largely in the ARIN region) and that an inter-RIR transfer policy was not in place until mid-2012, it is a logical conclusion that the majority of transfers would occur from and to ARIN region entities.

Unfortunately, I believe the study is also laden and interwoven with the authors opinions regarding the market rather than strictly focusing on the facts about the known market.

Full Report: http://www.internetgovernance.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/IPv4marketTPRC20121.pdf   (copy)

ARIN IPv4 transfer statistics 2011 and 2012 YTD

ARIN posted a message which some might have missed among the policy discussions going on the public policy mailing list (PPML).

ARIN Community –

Several folks have asked for more statistics regarding specified transfer
request processing.  While we are looking into options for producing such
information via automation, we have manually reviewed the past tickets to collect the following information:

In 2011, there was a total of 24 Specified Transfers (NRPM 8.3) requested.  
Below is the current status:

Total 8.3 transfers          24
Approved                          15
Pending/Abandoned      8
Denied                               1  (request was actually for simple reassignment)

In 2012 through July, there were a total of 19 Specified Transfers (NRPM 8.3) requested. Below is the current status.

Total of 8.3 transfers     18
Approved                          12
Pending/Abandoned      5
Denied                               1  (duplicate ticket)

Note that “Pending/Abandoned” is a request which lacks sufficient information from the requestor to process.  These may be still be in progress, or approved to transfer a lessor amount than requested and then not further pursued by the requestor.  Note also that some transfer requestors later return with a fully qualified recipient so that the address block may later be an approved transfer to another party in these statistics.

Original post is here:

http://lists.arin.net/pipermail/arin-ppml/2012-August/025633.html

Inter-RIR IPv4 transfers begin

ARIN announced today the implementation of the Inter-RIR IPv4 transfer policy (2011-1).  This policy, which has been discussed over the past two meetings was controversial for a number of reasons including that it would potentially move a lot of address space from the ARIN region to other regions.

Since the policy requires a compatible policy with each RIR only the APNIC region will currently be able to perform transfers under this policy.

ARIN has released new guidelines for “8.4 Inter-RIR Transfers to Specified Recipients”.

The announcement also included a note about a twitter discussion to be held August 8th to discuss the new policy.

ARIN Returns IPv4 Addresses to IANA

After the adoption of the Global Policy for Post Exhaustion of IPv4 resources by the ICANN board, the ARIN board has decided to return to IANA some of the resources that it had received back from legacy address address holders.  All of this space is the equivalent of a /8.  The largest part of this block came from Interop who returned almost a /8 to ARIN in 2010.  The long-term effect of this will bring ARIN’s IPv4 exhaustion date closer to RIPE’s exhaustion date which is expected this year.

From: Geoff Huston’s IPv4 Address Report

Presumably IANA will now proceed to reallocate this address space to all 5 RIRs according to the global policy.  However, given that some RIRs currently have a sufficient free pool one would expect them to decline the reallocation of space, thus a majority of the space seems likely to go to either APNIC or RIPE.  APNIC’s current IPv4 policy, however, would only allow blocks of size /22 or smaller to be allocated.

From a practical perspective, it seems like it would have been more reasonable for ARIN to just return the largest blocks and reallocate the small blocks to new or existing IPv4 address holders.  However, the final /8 allocations process by chance ended up giving ARIN a much larger supply than was needed compared with the other RIRs.  Thus, it seems likely the ARIN board felt compelled to “right this wrong” as well as to continue its previously existing operational procedure to return to IANA IPv4 space received from organizations prior to ARIN’s formation.