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Category Archives: IPv4

IPv4 address exports in Romania

Here at the the RIPE 71 meeting in Bucharest, Romania.  A very interesting presentation was given by one of the IP address brokers about the large scale export of IPv4 addresses from Romania.

According to data from RIPE and Cipiran Nica, 66% of all exported addresses in the RIPE region are from Romania. RO had 13.5M addresses before runout, then exported 5.2 M or more than 1/3 of the total addresses in the country. By contrast the next largest exporter in the region, Germany, was the source of 14% of the RIPE transfers.  This 14%, however, constituted less than 2% of total addresses registered in Germany.  

This export has always seemed a bit of an oddity since it was noted in earlier blog post from Dyn earlier in 2015. 

The presentation at the meeting revealed some of the on the ground details that are not easily explained by the statistics themsevles.  The primary reason so many of these addresses came on to the market was that a majority of the addresses in the country were being rented or were previously used for spam.  Prior to IPv4 exhaustion many RO companies rented addresses due to the cost of becoming a LIR. Additionally, there has been consolidation of the ISPs in the region and as these smaller ISPs were taken over the addreses were returned to the LIRs.  These are the addresses that went into the transfer market along with addresses that were obtained mostly for companies which were doing snowshoe spam. The addresses which were used for spam constituted 68% of exported addresses.  Approximately 30% of the addresses were from formerly rented addresses.

Estimates of actual IPv4 usage from the top 5 companies companies in Romania show that about 4.2M addresses are being used to conver 95% of the Internet access customers in the country.  

It will be interesting to see if this large scale export of IPv4 resources will have a negative effect on the longer term.  A number of the largest providers here are quite agressive in their IPv6 rollouts, but even those require IPv4 to be able to connect end users to the rest of the predominantly IPv4 Internet.

Romania’s Jump to the Number One exporter of IPv4 Addresses

ARIN 36 Public Policy Preview

arin-36-logoNext week is the ARIN 36 meeting in Montreal.   Here is my look ahead at the some of the policies being discussed at the meetings.  There are two recommended drafts that will be discussed along with nine other draft policies.  If you aren’t going to be there in person check out the remote participation options.

2015-1 IPv6 Initial End-User Assignments (Recommended Draft)

Policy Summary: This recommended draft policy allows organizations which have 13 different sites to qualify for an /40 IPv6 block.

Discussion: This policy is intended to aid the widespread adoption and stabilization of IPv6 by allowing small organizations to obtain a permanent block of IPv6 addresses rather than having to obtain a block from their upstream provider. There has been little opposition to this policy change and I expect it to move forward to Last-Call.

2015-4 Modify 8.2 section to better reflect how ARIN handles reorganizations (Recommended Draft)

Policy Summary: This recommended draft policy clarifies existing staff practice regarding reorganizations.  It explicitly notes that a needs-test is not required for reorganizations.

Discussion: This policy was created by the AC after a Policy Experience Report noted that the current policy is causing some confusion by the membership.  The AC originally consider this as a possible editorial change, but decided that it was best to put this policy through the entire policy process.  There has been no opposition to this codification of existing practice.  I expect this policy to move forward to Last-Call.

2014-14 Remove Needs Test on Small Transfers

2014-14 Policy Summary: This draft policy removes needs testing from blocks which are smaller than /20 and permits an organization to have one needs-free transfer per year as long as a corporate officer attests to the organizations need of the addresses.

Discussion: This policy was rewritten extensively, largely by myself, with input from members of the AC.  When the policy was returned to the list the new text seems to have fallen flat without much discussion.  In my mind this means I have crafted text that now appeals to very few because it makes great compromises between the two sides of the argument for and against needs testing in the transfer market, or people don’t think this type of policy will solve the problems that exist in the current transfer market.  I suspect this policy will likely be abandoned by the AC following the meeting.  Hopefully, at least we have a robust discussion about what types of policy changes are needed as ARIN moves to mostly processing transfers rather than issuing addresses from the IPv4 free pool.

2015-2 Inter-RIR Transfers to Specified Recipients

Policy Summary: This policy allows an organization which receives a transfer in the ARIN region to transfer it to another RIR within 24 months of receiving the transfer.

Discussion: The policy is intended to benefit large organizations which receive a block via transfer in the ARIN region and then want to transfer it to a subsidiary or other entity in another region.  (There is however no restriction in the existing text that it be a subsidiary.)   Some have not supported this policy as it is a “workaround” for broken geolocation issues.  Furthermore some have opposed this as they see potential for increased address market speculation.

2015-3 Remove 30 day utilization requirement in end-user IPv4 policy

Policy Summary: This draft policy remove the 30 day usages requirement for IPv4 end-users.

Discussion: This policy is intended to remove what has been considered an onerous requirement on end-users.  Under current policy an end-users is supposed to put 25% of their block into use with 30 days, based upon a 1 year allocation. This requirement has always been very hard for organizations to meet and has skewed the allocation sizes downward.  With end-users now forced to obtain assignments via the transfer market, this policy provision is much less relevant.

2015-5 Out of region use

2015-6 Transfers and Multi-national Networks

Policy Summary: This two policy drafts are followups to the previous policy 2014-1 Out of Region use.

Discussion: 2015-5 is a rewrite of the original 2014-1 policy but with the an expanded definition of nexus to determine if an organization should be allowed to obtain address blocks from ARIN.  2015-6 is a different look at the same problem and approach it by looking only at the transfer market.  In 2015-6, the policy instructs ARIN to ignore where addresses are utilized when processing transfers.  Currently ARIN only considers a block utilized if a covering route is announced in the ARIN region and the usual utilization requirements have been met.

There has been quite a bit of discussion on these two items and previous policy it will be interesting to see if either or both of them obtain enough support to move them forward to be a recommended policy at a future meeting.

2015-7 Simplified requirements for demonstrated need for IPv4 transfers

Policy Summary: Replaces the needs test for transfers with an officer’s attestation to 50% use within 24 months.

Discussion: This policy is intended to loosen the transfer requirements, but leave the other transfer qualification methods intact in case an organization want to use them.

2015-8 Reassignment records for IPv4 End-Users

Policy Summary: Allows end-user organizations to add reassignment records to the ARIN database.

Discussion: Reassignment records can be used for a number of different functions which could benefit the overall desire to increase database accuracy by allowing organizations to add additional details in the database.  This policy has been weakly supported on the list, but it will be interesting to see if it gathers more support at the meeting.

2015-9 Eliminating needs-based evaluation for Section 8.2, 8.3, and 8.4 transfers

Policy Summary: Removes needs-based testing from the transfer policy.

Discussion: This policy has been supported and not supported by the “usual” sides in this debate.  It is unclear if anything has changes substantially at this point such that a policy like this could move forward.

2015-10 Minimum IPv6 Assignments

Policy Summary: Sets a utilization “floor” to encourage ISPs to give users an adequate IPv6 allocation per the IETF guidelines.

Discussion: This policy is supported by those who believe that ISPs will not issue large enough blocks (e.g. /56 or larger) to end users.  Statements of non-support have been seen by operators who note that how they provision their network with their users is a organizational decision, not a registry and public policy issue.

2015-11 Remove transfer language which only applied pre-exhaustion of IPv4 pool

Policy Summary: Removes language in the policy manual which was used prior to IPv4 exhaustion.

Discussion: This policy is intended to cleanup the policy manual by removing language that is no longer applicable because the policy conditions under which policy sections were slated to be used are no longer applicable.

ARIN’s IPv4 wait-list already almost a /12

ARIN announced a new report (Waiting List for Unmet Requests) on its website showing its waiting list for IPv4 address space.  As of Aug 24, 2015, the list has already grown to almost a /12 worth of IPv4 address space in just 7 weeks since the first organization was put on the list July 1st, 2015.  Today, there are 56 organizations with requests on the wait list.  The average size is about a /19, with the largest request(s) being a /16.

While some of these requests will be filled with space from the IANA recovered address pool, some requests will not be met with the next allocation.  IANA is slated to issue its next block of addresses to each RIR on September 1st, 2015.  According to the published code IANA will issue a /14 equivalent to each of the RIRs.

Waiting List for Unmet Requests (snapshot – 20150824)