Dyn research has posted an interesting commentary on some of the things that they are seeing in the IPv4 transfer market. Specifically, interesting is the address sales that are occurring in Romania with addresses being transferred out of the country.
Category Archives: IPv4
IP addresses in 2014
Geoff Huston has posted his 2014 version of his IP addressing report. A few notes from within the report.
- Cisco, Morgan Stanely, & Gartner predicted that by 2020 there will be between 25 – 75 billion devices on the Internet as the “Internet of things” comes to life with embedded devices all requiring connections.
- LacNIC, RIPE, and APNIC’s austerity address pools are slated to be depleted between 2017-2021 if current trends continue to hold.
- IPv4 transfers increased quite dramatically in 2014 with APNIC performing 340 a 220% increase, and RIPE 919 a 600% increase. RIPE’s increasing transfers seem to be clearly being driven by the lack of needs-basis requirements in the region.
- LacNIC and RIPE continue to lead the world in IPv6 allocations with 1,208 and 2,218 respectively.
ARIN’s free pool moves below a /9
ARIN’s IPv4 free pool continues it slow march to depletion. Recently, the pool passed the symbolic level of a /9. Today in mid-December 2014, Geoff Huston’s projection shows the depletion date of April 14, 2015, but a few large allocations could certainly cause the pool to be depleted much sooner.
ARIN also has an additional /10 which will be used for IPv6 transition technologies under a separate assignment policy (NRPM 4.10).
ARIN 34 & Nanog PPC Preview
Next week is the ARIN meeting in Baltimore. There also will be a public policy consultation at Nanog 62 on Tuesday morning. Here is my look ahead at the some of the nine policies being discussed at the meetings. There is only one recommended draft that will be discussed, but lots of other draft policies are on the agenda and we will be looking for input on how to proceed.
2014-9 Resolve RSA & 8.2 Transfer Conflict
Policy Summary: This recommended draft policy removes two words (“aggregate” and “reclaim”) from the mergers and acquisitions section of the transfer policy.
Discussion: The current registration services agreement, the contract that governs the relationship between ARIN and resource holders, has language which prevents ARIN from reclaiming address space when it is underutilized. However, the M&A transfer policy has language which prevents an organization from transferring their resource into their new name when they are underutilized. Because of this, we end up with orphaned records which don’t really match the new organization who is the new resource holder. Initially the draft policy had language in it which would have solved this problem, but this was removed because a number of critics of the policy believed that needs testing still should be performed and enforced for M&A transfers.
At this point, when IPv4 addresses are assets which can be transferred by sale to another organization, the limits in the M&A policy don’t make sense to me and only seem to create an environment where number resource records are not updated because current utilization rates may not be met across the new or combined organization. Still this seems like a symbolic change that people have supported and will probably achieve consensus at the meetings.
2014-14 Remove Needs Test on Small Transfers
2014-20 Slow Start Transfer & Simplified Needs
Both of these policies are suggesting changes in the transfer policies due to the imminent run-out of the IPv4 free pool and the changing requirements of the transfer market.
2014-14 Policy Summary: This draft policy removes needs testing from blocks which are smaller than /16 and permits an organization to have one needs-free transfer per year.
2014-20 Policy Summary: This draft is a complex change to both the current IPv4 policy and its related transfer elements. It seeks to significantly change how we look at the various aspects of obtaining addresses from ARIN or on the transfer market.
Discussion: I believe that changes are necessary for the transfer policy and the existing IPv4 policy as the free-pool is depleted. How we address these changes is critical to the success of ARIN and its mission, but also the success of the transition to IPv6. These two policies take different approaches toward the changes which are necessary after IPv4 depletion in the ARIN region. I suspect there will be a lot of discussion about these two policies and the need to update the existing policy set in a post IPv4 depletion world.
2014-16 Section 4.10 Austerity Policy Update
Policy Summary: This draft policy creates a new subsection of the policy manual to provide an austerity pool of IPv4 resources for organizations which do not currently have any resources directly from ARIN.
I drafted this policy after a number of discussions at the last ARIN meeting in Chicago where it was noted that the current IPv4 policy has limitations inherent in it for new entrants. This draft was modeled on the successful implementation of similar policies in the APNIC and RIPE regions.
Discussion: Most of the discussion about this draft has been about how to divide up the current /10 and the IANA reclaimed blocks between the existing transition technology pool and the new pool created by this policy. Hopefully, it will become clear during our discussions if the community supports creating an austerity pool and how they wish to divide up the currently reserved /10 and the IANA reclaimed blocks for new organizations which do not currently have address blocks from ARIN.
2014-17 Change utilization requirements
Policy Summary: This draft policy changes how IPv4 utilization is calculated to deal with limitations on subsequent allocation for some organizations.
Issues: The draft policy currently changes the utilization definition for all organizations. The side effect of this is that large organizations could obtain large new blocks just from the implementation of this policy. A few options to change the draft policy text are being discussed to deal with this issue.
Discussion: This policy fixes a known issue for smaller organizations which has occurred due to the smaller 3-month allocation model that is currently in use for subsequent allocations. While this policy lowers the utilization bar and has the perceived negative effect noted above for large organizations, this policy as written now could be beneficial for the transfer market as it would make it easier for organizations to meet the utilization requirements for future transfers.
Routing table growth causes some hiccups
News reports have been circulating over the past couple of days that various service providers have hit the 512k route mark in their BGP tables on their routers and switches causing outages and other problems. A number of hardware platforms, notably older Cisco hardware, have default limits in their configurations which limit route tables sizes to 512k routes. When these limits are breached the older hardware slows down or otherwise stop functioning as expected. Cisco issued a bulletin in May to providers with workaround procedures for some platforms.
The growth in the global route table has been fairly stable over the past couple of years and this is growth has been expected for a long time and yet still Internet service providers were not prepared in time for this event.
Internet Touches Half Million Routes: Outages Possible Next Week
Internet routers hitting 512K limit, some become unreliable
The end of the internet predicted, news at 11
Echoes of Y2K: Engineers Buzz That Internet Is Outgrowing Its Gear