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Category Archives: IPv6

ARIN 31 Draft Policy preview and predictions

ARIN 31The spring ARIN 31 meeting is fast approaching.    The final meeting agenda has recently been published. There are also opportunities to participate remotely for those who are unable to make the meeting in person.

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…

2012-2 IPv6 subsequent allocations

Policy Summary: Changes the way utilization is determined for ISPs who return to ARIN for additional IPv6 allocations.

Issues: Since the initial IPv6 policy was implemented, it has been  understood that the IPv6 policy would need to be modified as implementation experience was gained.  Since the idea of hierarchy is important in IPv6 networks, this policy allows a network’s regions which grow at different speeds to retain the hierarchy structure and still allow fast growing regions to obtain the needed additional IPv6 address space.  Since the draft policy’s introduction there was strong consensus that the existing policy needed to change, the challenge has always been the details of policy text.

Prediction: This policy will finally reach consensus at this meeting and will be sent to last-call for approval.

2013-1 Inter-RIR transfers of ASNs

Policy Summary: Allows organizations to request to transfer an autonomous system number (ASN) from one RIR to another.

Issues: ARIN recently adopted policies which both allow the directed transfer of IPv4 between regions and also allowed the directed transfer of ASNs within the ARIN region. This policy extends this trend to allow ASNs to transfer between RIRs.  Some stakeholders in general disagree with the idea of allowing IP resources to trade and will likely oppose this policy.  On the other side are those who will argue that this policy is a logical extension of the existing policy to allow resources to be transferred to where they are needed.

Prediction: This policy will have signification discussion about the need for the policy and the role of inter-RIR relationships, but I suspect the final consensus at the meeting will be to proceed with the implementation of this draft policy.

2013-2 3GPP IP Resource Policy

Policy Summary: Allows organizations to use a lower utilization requirement for provisioning their 3GPP networks when requesting additional IP addresses.

Issues: Wireless operators have been using space beyond RFC 1918 (such as 1.0.0.0/8) to solve their addressing needs and now that this is becoming part of the “Internet” they need to move off of that space. With ARIN’s /8 inventory currently at approximately 2.5, I’m skeptical that any policy using global IPv4 unicast space can actually solve this problem.   The policy text of this draft policy is also not complete at this time and if consensus is achieved on the concepts of the policy change this draft policy would have to return for discussion at another ARIN meeting.

Prediction: This policy will be abandoned by the AC following the meeting.

2013-3 Tiny IPv6 Allocations for ISPs

Policy Summary: Allows ISPs to request smaller than normal IPv6 address blocks or return larger IPv6 blocks to reduce their IPv6 holdings.

Issues: This draft policy addresses an issue where ISPs are being moved into a larger ARIN fee category under the new fee schedule and allows them to return address space to move to a smaller IPv6 fee category.  There has been significant discussion on the PPML mailing list about this issue and at this point it seems unclear if this proposal will achieve consensus at the meeting.   The primary argument against this policy is that this policy undermines the best current practices for IPv6 subnetting, the intended hierarchical addressing structure defined by the IETF in the IPv6 RFCs, and generous nature of intended IPv6 assignments to end-users.  Some stakeholders will argue that ARIN’s fees shouldn’t be used as a force to dictate a network’s IPv6 architecture.   Arguments for the policy are that some small ISPs don’t need and never will use the current minimum block size of a /32 or /36 and should be able to get a /48 which meets their network needs.

Prediction: This policy will be sent to last call by the AC following the meeting.  (I suspect it is possible that the /48 option will be removed from the draft policy as part of the discussion)

 

2012 IP Address Statistics

Geoff Huston has published his annual look at IP address allocation and assignment statistics.

Addressing 2012: Another One Bites the Dust   (copy)

Plenty of numbers in the report to take a look at…  Notably, we saw ARIN’s 2012 (45 million) allocation rate increase back to its 2010 rate after falling dramatically in 2011 (23.5 million).  RIPE allocated its last IPv4 blocks under its “regular” allocation scheme in mid-September 2012 and moved into the IPv4 exhaustion phase of allocations.  In the RIPE region, there wasn’t an apparent “run-on-the-bank” increase in the allocation rate as the registry moved into the exhaustion phase.

fig8

Here Geoff’s updated RIR Address Exhaustion Model shows ARIN moving into the exhaustion phase in mid-2014 with LACNIC in late 2014.  AFRINIC’s trend-line currently points to an exhaustion point 9 years from January 2013.

Another interesting statistic found in the report is that the total number of smart phones and tablets purchased during 2012 amounts to almost 779 million units.  If each of those devices used a native IPv4 address that would use up 21% of the total IPv4 address space.

Geoff finishes the report with a somewhat pessimistic outlook for the Internet industry.

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. The same trends of market aggregation are now appearing in content provision, where a small number of content providers are exerting a dominant position across the entire Internet.

This changing makeup of the Internet industry has quite profound implications in terms of network neutrality, the separation of functions of carriage and service provision, investment profiles and expectations of risk and returns on infrastructure investments, and on the openness of the Internet itself.

 

IPv6 Adoption Update

Iljitsch van Beijnum has recently published an update on IPv6 adoption: IPv6 takes one step forward, IPv4 two steps back in 2012.

The second page of his article mentions the economics of IPv6 deployment as reason for the slow deployment of IPv6.

Apparently, the economics of moving to IPv6 before we absolutely, positively had to without delay weren’t there. As with all technology, IPv6 gets better and cheaper over time. And just like with houses, people prefer waiting rather than buying when prices are dropping. To make matters worse, if you’re the only one adopting IPv6, this buys you very little.

And the pain of the shrinking IPv4 supplies versus the pain of having to upgrade equipment and software varies for different groups of Internet users.

…

All this means that organizations that are experiencing a lack of sufficient IPv4 addresses will have to address that problem in some other way: by having multiple users share a single IPv4 address through Network Address Translation (NAT).

This echos my thoughts on the matter when I wrote about them extensively in 2011.  Use of IPv4 NAT as a substitute for moving to IPv6 was one of the concerns that I and others have raised which could delay or deter IPv6 adoption.

A positive note on IPv6 deployment since 2011:  It does seem that IPv6 has been adopted permanently by a number of the large content providers, so at least one side of the transaction is there.  Further deployment of IPv6, in my opinion, now depends on the large cable and broadband providers.  Only when millions of those subscribers are converted to be IPv6 enabled will we see significant uptake in IPv6 traffic.

Lee Howard of Time Warner noted last year at the IETF 84 that just getting to 1% of current broadband subscribers is a significant effort.  At NANOG 56, Lee also noted that the economics of IPv4 xfers vs. carrier-grade NAT vs. IPv6 aren’t as simple as they might seem.

IPv6 growth and statistics from Akamai

Akamai recently released their latest “State of the Internet” report.  It is probably one of the most positive reports and statistics I have seen regarding IPv6 deployment and use.  Their IPv6 status page today reports almost 72,000 hits per second.

Akamai noted the following regarding IPv6 traffic in their report:
• A 67x increase in the number of unique IPv6 addresses making requests for content
• A 460x increase in the number of requests made for content over  IPv6
• A 9x increase in requests from end users in the United States made against a dual-stack (IPv4 & IPv6) consumer-oriented Web site

A copy of the report is available here (registration required).

IPv6 Launch Day Wrap Up

IPv6 Launch Day was June 6th 2012.  As expected a number of high profile content providers such as Google, Microsoft (Bing), and Yahoo inserted DNS IPv6 records known as quad-A records for their main website into the global DNS.  I just did a quick check on a few of these sites and found their IPv6 record still are live and active.  With the quad-A records in place this allows those with native IPv6 connectivity to reach these sites wholly over IPv6.  This  is a great milestone, but still only a small step along the way to IPv6 adoption.

As I have discussed earlier, in this blog and in my other papers, I believe the main area which needs attention for IPv6 to become the dominate and majority protocol carrying Internet traffic is adoption by broadband providers servicing residential and commercial customers.  Until we see large deployments with tens of thousands if not millions of IPv6 customers by companies such as Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T the road to a viable IPv6 infrastructure remains somewhat uncertain.

Below are a few other articles with good wrap-up information from the IPv6 Launch Day event.