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Game over IPv4. There's still a lot of waste that can be reclaimed before it's game over for IPv4. For just two examples - both Ford Motor Company and Prudent
by 300bps 7y ago
Game over IPv4.
There's still a lot of waste that can be reclaimed before it's game over for IPv4. For just two examples - both Ford Motor Company and Prudential Securities are currently assigned over 16.7 million public IPv4 addresses each.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...
So do Apple, AT&T, the U.S. Postal Service and others.
- SAI_Peregrinus 7y agoAT&T is an ISP, with millions of customers. I'd expect them to need a /8, or more.
- _-david-_ 7y agoApple and USPS are not ISPs. It doesn't seem like they need a /8 though.
- kitteh 7y agoComically when Apple would setup a store they'd ask their isps to provide an allocation rather than dip into their allocation.
- jandrese 7y agoFrom a global routing perspective this makes sense. Otherwise every store has to advertise its netblock on BGP. Not impossible, but it bloats the routing table unnecessarily. Better for Apple to keep those addresses on its campus and let the stores connect like regular Internet endpoints. Even better would be for Apple to return most of those addresses and only use a handful of /16s for its hosted services like any other business and switch the internal nets to RFC1918.
- cornishpixels 7y agoAT&T (the ISP's) allocations are to AT&T Corp, not AT&T Services.
- icedchai 7y agoAT&T's 12/8 is used for end-user address assignments by AT&T Services. See https://bgp.he.net/AS7018#_prefixes https://bgp.he.net/AS7018#_prefixes for their announcements.
- kitteh 7y agoMost of their broadband subs are from legacy SBC (ameritech, swbell, nvbell, pacbell, snet). They got all their allocations separately. None of them came out of 12/8 or 32/8 traditionally.
- IcePic 7y agoSo, in the speeds ipv4 was handed out before they ran out, how long would two /8s last? Weeks? Months? You'd be able to slack on moving to ipv6 for those weeks, months. Whee.
- 300bps 7y agoThe last two /8s were handed out in January of 2011 so quite a bit longer than weeks or months. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion#Address_depletion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion#Addres... Entire networks of computers can share a single public IP address so the 33.5 million public IP addresses supplied by two /8s could last quite a long time. Or we can let Ford sit on them.
- mfro 7y agoFord? is there a listing of what companies own the largest blocks? EDIT: just found it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...
- IcePic 7y agoSo given the rate at the time, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion#/media/File:Rir-rate.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion#/media... with some 1M ips given out PER DAY, how long would two /8s last? 4 weeks, or 33 days. That is not "quite a bit longer", it is literally what I suggested. It is only now, long after the crunch that thinking entire networks would share a single ip (hopefully never running any SIP,bittorrent or something that needs more than one port simultaneously) or the entire network would quickly run out of the 64k ports usable... So, if Ford and whoever had that second net did give it back when it started to get scarce, all of 33 days is what we would have "won". Good margin for writing up that ipv6 migration plan I guess.
- formercoder 7y agoIndeed, until now there has been no financial incentive for those companies to sell the IPs. At a certain point demand and willingness to pay rise making sellers interested in selling. Or maybe IPv6 will happen instead. The problem is IPv6 requires a lot of very complex inventive alignment, whereas an IPv4 market will just result in a well understood price/scarcity relationship.
- theandrewbailey 7y agoThe going rate for an IPv4 address is at least $10 each. Selling a /8 block would be a nice $160 million profit.
- CountSessine 7y agoOuch! That makes Stanford's voluntary surrender of their /8 block back in 2004 extraordinarily expensive! Think about how many scholarships that could have paid for!
- theandrewbailey 7y agoThat price is based on what Microsoft paid for Nortel's block in 2011.[0] I think there was another purchase of IP addresses since (by Amazon, maybe), but I'm not able to locate a price. [0] https://www.networkworld.com/article/2228854/microsoft-pays-nortel--7-5-million-for-ipv4-addresses.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/2228854/microsoft-pays-...
- AstroJetson 7y agoDuPont sold off their 52.a.b.c to Microsoft and Amazon 5 years ago.
- kitteh 7y agoIt's well over 10 today.
- o-__-o 7y ago
- lmm 7y agoThe problem isn't the number of addresses, it's the address space fragmentation. The IPv4 global routing table is already 3x the size it should be. At the point where you're just giving every device an arbitrary number, the addresses cease to function as addresses.
- sh-run 7y agoLISP is meant to solve this problem, but it's yet to be deployed outside of the test network. It could also be used to address exhaustion to some extent by allowing the use of prefixes longer than /24 on the internet, although that is not the intention. https://www.lisp4.net/ https://www.lisp4.net/ https://neverthenetwork.com/notes/lisp/ https://neverthenetwork.com/notes/lisp/ Full disclosure, the second link is my blog.
- CountSessine 7y agoI guess this would give us a few years of breathing room by letting us fragment ipv4? Does anyone support this other than Cisco (ie Broadcom/Cavium/Intel/Barefoot)?
- sh-run 7y agoReally it's meant to solve the fragmentation that already exists. Cisco developed the standard, but it's completely open. I believe Cisco is the only large vendor that's implemented it, but there are Linux and BSD implementations, which should make it easy for any Linux or BSD based NOS to implement it in the future. Honestly this problem will probably be mostly solved in hardware with larger FIBs/TCAMs Edit - I should clarify the problem I'm referring to here is fragmentation, not exhaustion.
- mprovost 7y agoEspecially if you stop allocating TCAM memory for the much larger v6 addresses. I hate to think how much memory is sitting out there in routers, configured for 128 bit v6 addresses and never used...
- no_wizard 7y agoI don't think Apple will ever give up their IPv4 block unless forced by legal means of some sort. They use the massive IPv4 block internally if I recall correctly. I could see most others doing it though.
- kccqzy 7y agoYes I heard the same thing. Must be really convenient having a publicly addressable (probably not publicly routable) IP address for every machine internally.
- jandrese 7y agoYes, it does make a lot of stuff much easier. Which is why it is so painful to see IPv6 mired in the mud for year after year.