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> What’s stopping a hedge fund from buying up a /12 block and renting it out? This is basically what Amazon does. I don’t see an easy way for a hedge fund to
by Bluecobra 4y ago
> What’s stopping a hedge fund from buying up a /12 block and renting it out?
This is basically what Amazon does.
I don’t see an easy way for a hedge fund to rent out the IP space unless they are a cloud provider. The problem is that to participate in BGP/the Internet, the smallest allocation that can advertised is a /24. You need to own the space you advertise before an ISP would allow this. The hedge fund would need to transfer the a minimum of a /24 to you and I guess you would have a contact to pay the hedge fund a monthly fee and give the space back when you’re done? Seems a bit messy to me.
- tomklein 4y agoActually, you can assign (not transfer) IP ranges and the one advertising it does not need to own it, but would need a Letter of Authorization (LoA) or similar.
- GoOnThenDoTell 4y agoWhat causes the restriction of /24, rather than being able to route individual addresses?
- casylum 4y agoRouting tables need to be limited in size in order for hardware to decide where to route packets fast enough. In the past hardware was more cpu and memory bound than the present.
- Dylan16807 4y agoBut also at present, dealing with millions of routes at the packet-switching level gets difficult. Especially because the speed of links has increased so much.
- ikiris 4y agoPhysics. Routers can only handle so many routes, so their operators set floor values for size of route they'll generally accept.
- netr0ute 4y agoThen it's time for operators to get with the times, because routers today don't have those same limitations as before.
- betaby 4y agoNothing to do with with operators. Again, physics, notably tcam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_memory#Ternary_CAMs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_memory#Ter... very expensive.
- wmf 4y agoRecent routers can handle 1M routes while the Internet routing table currently has... 928K routes. Allowing people to disaggregate further would blow out routers. I'm not counting gold-plated routers because I see no reason to force ISPs to buy those.
- msbarnett 4y agoDo you have any conception of how much TCAM would be required to individually route 14 billion IP addresses? And even beyond that what else would be involved to route things fast enough at that granularity. A top end router today can handle ~million routes. You’re talking a four orders of magnitude increase.
- netr0ute 4y agoWho said the prefixes had to go to /32? Just to /28 would only need 16 million routes.
- lostapathy 4y agoPractical reasons of replacing "all the routers" aside ... would this even be desirable? Do we really want IP space carved up into smaller and smaller bites? Do we really want even more and smaller entities advertising routes into BGP? The big players have enough troubles with it - we don't need small businesses with a /28 playing in those waters.
- phil21 4y ago> I don’t see an easy way for a hedge fund to rent out the IP space unless they are a cloud provider. This is a solved problem these days. I personally know of IPXO[0] and can vouch for them as being legitimate and well ran. If you have an idle /20 laying around or whatever, I highly suggest getting it on their market and making some relatively easy money leasing out your blocks. The total interaction (short of initial setup) these days is clicking a few buttons in your favorite interface to publish ROA records every so often when an IP block sees churn. A hedge fund could hire a junior neteng to handle those requests, the very rare abuse complaint, and any hijacked routes you need to track down. Overall this is becoming a mature market with a number of players emerging for a public market. In private it's been going on for some time on a much more informal basis. [0] ipxo.com
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]