IP Address News

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

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

Monthly Archives: January 2020

2019 Addressing

Geoff Huston has posted his annual review of the addressing world. Here are a few of my notes from reviewing the addressing and BGP reports.

  • IPv4 transfer transactions continued to grow in 2019, but the volume of addresses transferred fell to just over 44 million from highs in 2017 & 2018.
  • In the past 24 months the number of unadvertised /8s has actually risen from the 44-45 range to close to 50. This would seem to indicate that possibly the largest blocks have stopped being routed, and were transferred to other entities, but were not readvertised to the public Internet, yet, or that they are now being used internally for some purpose.
  • IPv4 blocks which are transferred are being broken up into smaller blocks in the ratio of approximately 9.5:1. That is for every original block which is transferred and broken up into smaller blocks 9.5 new blocks are created from the original.
  • US to US transfer transactions continue to dominate the transfer market with about 30 million of the 44 million in transfers in 2019.

BGP 2019-1 (copy)

BGP 2019-2 (copy)

Addressing 2019 (copy)

USG/DoD IPv4 blocks for sale someday?

The news that the US government (Department of Defense) was considering selling its 13 /8 blocks appeared on a number of mailing lists last month. The possible sale appeared in a version of the House appropriations bill. The Senate bill contained no such provision and the directive was stuck by the conference committee. Any future action on this area is unknown, but the fact that this appeared leads one to assume that it may come back in the future.

IPv4.global also recently published a commentary about the issue that discusses some of the possible impacts such a sale might make on the IPv4 market.

https://ipv4.global/u-s-department-of-defense-ipv4-address-space/

Previously, the US Government’s position on IPv4 block was that it would return them to the registry when they were no longer needed.

Consistent with the policies developed through the current multistakeholder model, the USG believes that all IP numbers are allocated for use on a needs basis and should be returned to the numbering pool when no longer needed.

https://www.ntia.doc.gov/blog/2012/united-states-government-s-internet-protocnumbering-principles

Times change and governments change too so its not surprising that given the value of the IPv4 holdings in today’s IPv4 market that politicians are revisiting what should happen to the DoD’s IPv4 resources.