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Category Archives: ARIN

IPv4 Transfer Market pricing transparency

Since most IPv4 transfers so far have occurred as private transactions the price for the address blocks has generally not been known.  There are various economic methods and theories which could predict the value of the underlying IPv4 address rights, but those models may not bear much resemblance to the actual market due to the model’s inability to take into account all the factors effecting the IPv4 marketplace.

There are a few public exceptions to the pricing data, notably bankruptcy cases (Nortel @ $11.25/address & Borders @  $12/address) where the pricing was made public as a part of the court filings.

Hilco Streambank which is an ARIN registered transfer facilitator has started a new auction service which is openly posting pricing for the IPv4 blocks.  According to their website, six blocks ranging in size from a /17 to a /24 have been sold in the past couple of months through this site.  (Their site reports the auctions have closed, but the actual transfer may not have occurred.) (copy)

Looking at the pricing information that they have posted, there is a clear premium being paid currently for smaller blocks.  The /24 block sold for $ 6,225 or $24.31 per address whereas the larger /17 & /20 blocks sold for between $7.25 – $7.32.  The actual bid information is not released publicly on their site, so we do not know how many organizations were bidding for the blocks or if the blocks sold for the minimum listed price.

It will be interesting to continue to watch to see how pricing for blocks changes over time and if other trends develop based upon source or destination RIR region for the transfers.

Links to sites on IPv4 pricing models and theories:

Addressing 2013

Geoff Huston recently released his 2013 IP addressing report.  A few notable details from the report.

  •  Device shipments for 2014 are expected to reach 2.47 Billion, each of those devices will need at least one IP address.
  • The industry continues to show consolidation of Internet numbering resources into the largest service and enterprise providers.
  • Geoff’s exhaustion model has ARIN’s IPv4 exhaustion date occurring with a 80% probability between Sept 2014 – June 2015.  (I personally think it will be sooner rather than later)
  • IPv6 allocations continue to grow with the RIPE region leading the world with 2,149 allocations of 4,018 total allocations in 2013 across all five RIRs.

Geoff concludes with the following insights:

The past three years has been dominated by the mass marketing of mobile internet services, and the growth rates for 2013 perhaps might have been the highest so far recorded were it not for the exhaustion of the IPv4 address pools in the Asia Pacific region and Europe and the Middle East. In address terms this growth is being masked by the use of Carrier Grade NATs in the mobile service provider environment, so that the resultant demands for public addresses in IPv4 are quite low.

Unfortunately no such broad scale of deployment of IPv6 was visible in the address statistics for 2013. This points to a mobile Internet whose continued growth in 2013 remains, for the most part, highly reliant on NATs, and this, in turn, points to some longer term elements of concern for the continued ability of the Internet to support further innovation and diversification in its portfolio of applications and services.

We are witnessing an industry that is no longer using technical innovation, openness and diversification as its primary means of propulsion. The widespread use of NATs limit the technical substrate of the Internet to a very restricted model of simple client/server interactions using TCP and UDP. The use of NATs force the interactions into client-initiated transactions, and the model of an open network with considerable flexibility in the way in which communications took place is no longer being sustained.

Today’s internet is serviced by a far smaller number of very large players, each of whom appear to be assuming a very strong position within their respective markets. The drivers for such larger players tend towards risk aversion, conservatism and increased levels of control across their scope of operation.

Addressing 2013 – That Was The Year That Was  (Copy)

2014 preview and 2013 wrapup

The ARIN region continues to move steadily toward IPv4 exhaustion with the total amount of IPv4 address resources available in the free pool being only 1.4 /8 equivalents as of February 3rd, 2014.  It seems very likely that the region will exhaust its free pool of IPv4 numbers by mid-2014.

With the coming exhaustion, a number of community members have submitted policy proposals dealing with a number of exhaustion issues.  ARIN has recently published these new draft policies and they are now open for discussion.

The RIPE region continues to move toward removing “need” (RIPE policy 2013-3) as a requirement for an IPv4 address assignment or allocation.  The working-group chairs recently forwarded the policy to the RIPE NCC for implementation.

In IPv6 news, Comcast’s continues their aggressive deployment of IPv6 and reported in late 2013 that 25% of their Internet customers are now provisioned with dual stack and plans to complete their IPv6 deployment in 2014.  Comcast also noted that they had reached the 75% deployment throughout their broadband network.  Additional commentary on other cable MSOs can be found here.

At the end of the year, the New York Times also published an intriguing interview with Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn about the future of the Internet entitled, Viewing Where the Internet Goes.

2014 ARIN Advisory Council

I’m pleased to announce that I have been appointed to serve a one year term on the ARIN Advisory Council as the result of a recent resignation.  My term will begin in January.  I look forward to serving the Internet community in this more formal role.  Thanks to those of you who voted for me in the previous ARIN election to put me in this position.

Thank you, Andrew Dul

ARIN 32 Draft Policy preview and predictions

arin32logoThe joint ARIN 32 & Nanog 59 meeting is coming up next week.  There are a number of substantive public policy items on the scheduled agenda.  If you are unable to come to the meeting please consider the remote participation option to have your opinion heard.

Here is my short commentary on the policy proposals being discussed at the meeting.  In this blog entry, I’ve also attempted to make some predictions on the discussion and outcome…

2013-4 RIR Principles

Policy Summary: This draft policy adds a section to the NRPM which would provide guiding direction for ARIN’s registry functions.  The core of these principles were originally found in RFC 2050, but the new draft 2050bis which was recently published as RFC 7020 removed a majority of these guiding principles.

Issues: The majority of the discussion about this policy has centered on two aspects.  1) Should this type of text be inserted at all into the NRPM or is already overlapping with ARIN’s mission statement and text in the Policy Development Process (PDP)?  2) Does the draft policy accurately reflect today’s guiding principles for the RIRs (specifically ARIN) registry functions?  Important issues that have been raised here center around the issue of “stewardship” & “conservation” and how that aspect should be documented in a IPv4 runout RIR.

Prediction: This policy will reach consensus at this meeting and will be sent to last-call for approval.  I suspect there will perhaps be some minor adjustments to the text to accommodate any issues raised during the policy discussion.

2013-6 Allocation of IPv4 and IPv6 Address Space to Out-of-region Requestors

Policy Summary:   This draft policy inserts text into the NRPM which would restrict future IP allocations and assignments to organizations who have a legal presences and substantially operate their network(s) inside the ARIN service region.

Issues: This policy originated from ARIN staff comment at the ARIN 31 meeting.  ARIN staff reported that they were seeing increasing numbers of requests from organizations where the IP address were likely to be used outside the ARIN service region or be assigned to customers outside the ARIN service region.  Staff comments on this draft policy indicate this proposed text would restrict the disbursement of resources to legal entities operating within the ARIN service region.

The key issue in this draft policy is the statement:

a plurality of new resources requested from ARIN must be justified by technical infrastructure or customers located within the ARIN service region

Staff comments reveal that this policy as currently written would “create a scenario where a network can’t get IPv4/IPv6 addresses from any RIR.”  Legal review also made note of this issue with this comment: “points of policy to avoid … adopting an overly prescriptive guidance or standard that fails to permit multinational business entities to obtain number resources.”  This is certainly not a desired outcome of the draft policy and I believe must be rectified.

While I believe ARIN staff would benefit from the additional clarity in this draft policy, I doubt this issue will be of as substantial importance after IPv4 exhaustion occurs in the ARIN region.

Prediction: I believe this policy will not achieve consensus at this meeting.  I think there will be significant dissent from the meeting participants to move forward with the current text.  I suspect if the “plurality” statement was removed from the policy it would likely achieve consensus or near consensus such that the policy would continue to move forward through the PDP.

2013-7 Merge IPv4 ISP and End-User Requirements

Policy Summary:   This draft policy makes numerous changes to the existing IPv4 policy which attempts to merge the differences between the ISP and End-User allocation & assignment policies.

Issues: The changes made in this draft policy are complex and intertwined.  It is easiest to see the proposed changes in this red-line version.

https://www.arin.net/policy/proposals/ARIN-prop-190%20proposed_text_changes.pdf

While I believe the general plan to attempt cleanup and streamlining of the IPv4 policy are headed in the right direction, I suspect the changes will not necessarily be well understood by the ARIN community and some skepticism will come about that the changes don’t necessarily all move in the right direction.  In general, this policy seems to loosen the requirements on organizations receiving IPv4 addresses, however these two changes are substantially different.

The utilization requirements on an initial end-user assignment changes from 25% immediate, 50% within one year to 80% within three months. This is offset by the lowering of the minimum block size requirement for single-homed networks.

This change seems to go against the idea of making it easier for initial end-user assignments, but this text changes the initial host count for single subnet from 1024 hosts immediately (25% of a /20) to 819 hosts in 3 months (80% of /22).

The timeframe for additional ISP allocations is changed from three months back to one year.

This change has been suggested a number of times, including 2012-4, since the 2009-8 policy put this into place.  In each instance, consensus generally has been toward not to keep changing the IPv4 requirements as IPv4 exhaustion occurs.

Prediction: I believe this policy will not achieve consensus at this meeting due to the large number of changes being proposed.  I suspect the draft policy will continue to be worked on by the AC and that the text will be updated subsequently and be presented at the next Public Policy Consultation (PPC).