5 ms·

RIPE is pretty much out now, they only allocate a single /22 to new registrants, or a /24 to existing members, and that is it. Working at a new startup ISP, an

by wilhil 13y ago

RIPE is pretty much out now, they only allocate a single /22 to new registrants, or a /24 to existing members, and that is it. Working at a new startup ISP, and sort of seeing this from the inside, I think the whole process is a complete joke. ANYONE who wants IPs can easily get them, average cost is about £10-£20 each, and a whole ip broker industry seems to have popped up over the last few years... Just google "Buy IP address", "IP Broker" or similar. The guidelines state that when you are not using an IP, you simply hand it back - but - I don't think ANYONE does this, and why would they as they are both free, there is no verification/auditing, and they are now like gold dust. Auditing is basically just a list of IPs and saying what you are using them for. Companies approach all the time saying that they have xx IPs for sale, and the official line when you ask "why are they available" is usually, "we can reorganise our network so we no longer require them"... In reality, I am sure they apply entire ranges to bogus interfaces just to make them look in use. It really annoys me that this side of the industry doesn't get more exposure!

thirdsight 13y ago
Well if it wasn't for all the heel-dragging with IPv6, this wouldn't be a problem.
- wilhil 13y ago
  IPv6 just won't happen fully any time soon... People are just kidding themselves. Too many "big" networks have admins who don't update their knowledge and are clueless about IPv6 - At some events where I see network admins, you can ask simple questions and judging by their body language, you know they are guessing/are clueless about IPv6. On top of this, some really high end network equipment that is still available now from some (high end) vendors is not 100% IPv6 compliant or has weird bugs, and, if network admins have recommended this equipment, they feel uncomfortable telling people it isn't up to scratch after their companies have invested significant money... so... this just makes the whole process stall. (Personal experience, not from the current job!) IPv6 is the future, but, being realistic, I don't see it happening any time soon.
  - growse 13y ago
    Except it's happening right now. Google's chart of percentage of requests coming over IPv6 shows that usage rate is accelerating: http://www.google.com/ipv6/statistics.html http://www.google.com/ipv6/statistics.html And my personal experience is the opposite - most 'big' networks are fully IPv6 capable (both in terms of equipment and staff), there's just no business case to enable it for many of them because of the lack of capability on home (consumer-grade) equipment.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - ghshephard 13y ago
    There are some reasons why IPv6 will take until 2015 until we start to see substantial adoption, but technician knowledge isn't one of them. Any competent IPv4 network engineer can come up to speed on IPv6 in a single one-week class. The major reason why we aren't seeing adoption is that there is no commercial need - that's the real driver.
    - TranceMan 13y ago
      anecdotal but in a presentation given by the head network architect at a large (ex national) uk communication provider - training engineers is the main reason ipv6 has not been rolled out.
      - ay 13y ago
        It's a pretty good excuse. But not a good reason anymore.
    - yaantc 13y ago
      > The major reason why we aren't seeing adoption is that > there is no commercial need - that's the real driver. Not entirely true. All big networks using private IP addresses and NAT (recent ISPs, and most cellular networks for example) have to implement carrier grade NAT (CGN), and it's getting painful and costly. Also, a lot of web applications require low latency. The way to do this is often to create a lot of parallel connections to fetch content. For example, a google map can easily span 40+ TCP connection to fetch all the tiles making the MAP. During peak time this can put a very high load on CGN gateways. And when they overload, some sessions lags or time out (missing or delayed tiles => bad user experience). This is why all big players on the web now support IPv6 and use it when possible. IPv6 avoid CGN and does not have such issues. Even if that still makes a small percentage of all traffic, it's steadily rising now. IPv6 is finally happening, because the alternative (CGN) is too painful to scale. Now old large ISP with little growth don't care: they have plenty of public IPv4 addresses, with enough in stock to absorb their limited growth for a while. So they don't need CGN and don't care about IPv6. I don't expect this to change. But with mobile and cellular getting a bigger and bigger share and mostly on NAT with IPv4 there is enough of a pressure to move to IPv6 to make sure it'll be mainstream by the end of the decade.
mino 13y ago
I share your pain, bro :) Although, two corrections: 1) prices are, in my experience, lower than what you quoted: around 10-12 $/IP, depending on the subnet size. 2) RIPE is indeed encouraging the marketplace model: it is seen as a mechanism to move resources to LIRs that need them the most, with the side effect of increasing IP efficiency. Also, to note: 4) Since some time, there is a policy proposal [1] to allow intra-RIR transfers to/from RIPE. I'm not aware on whether there is such a proposal within ARIN, which currently allows only transfers to/from APNIC (not very useful if you're american... addresses in APNIC ended a long time ago!). 5) RIPE currently operates in a "emergency policy" that allows a /22 to new registrants and a /24 to new members. ARIN will follows the same policy as soon as they remain with a single /8 left (probably around May-June 2014). 6) I always like to give a link to the very informative exhaustion graph of Geoff Huston [3] :) [1] http://www.ripe.net/ripe/policies/proposals/2012-03 http://www.ripe.net/ripe/policies/proposals/2012-03 [2] https://www.arin.net/resources/request/transfers_8_4.html https://www.arin.net/resources/request/transfers_8_4.html [3] http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/index.html http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/index.html
- wilhil 13y ago
  Sorry, meant $ instead of £... I have seen a few prices much much higher from some smaller places (one Eastern European ISP trying to sell a /24 for $40 each), I guess trying to make a quick bit of cash.... but I think $10-$12 as you said is more usual for larger purchases.
rplnt 13y ago
> The guidelines state that when you are not using an IP, you simply hand it back Maybe that's why ISPs hand out public IP addresses like nothing?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
cpach 13y ago
Wouldn’t it be better if IANA or the regional Internet registries directly rented out the IP addresses to the ISP:s/companies who need them? Why let a middle-man collect the profits?
- wilhil 13y ago
  Awkward to say... These companies (at least RIPE) are non profit making - you join for a fixed fee and then you get as many IPs as you need. It would be a good idea on one hand and a pain on the other... I am trying to think of a counter to it in my head, but, I can't really... a small fee is easily absorbed in per user costs and so many companies use public ips for internal routing when a private ip would do a good job... Then again, you could get big companies asking to rent out more than they need and refusing to hand back... Even if there was fool proof way of provisioning and managing, I personally think it is far too late to do it :(
- bradleyjg 13y ago
  Yes. Best would be a formula that increased the per ip cost the more ips you had. That would have at least two advantages: first it would pressure the legacy class A holders who are collectively sitting on 100M+ not publicly used addresses; second it would make it unprofitable to hoard and resell. The current method resembles water law in the US western states, which is just about the worst possible way to allocate access to a limited resource.
- noselasd 13y ago
  Bit to late for that, and the people that already got the IP addresses are unlikely to give them back. The internet is basically the sum of all the BGP routes sitting around on routers, it's unlikely any single organization could have much success trying to reclaim and redistribute those addresses.
gwu78 13y ago
"It really annoys me that this side of the industry doesn't get more exposure!" If only more self-proclaimed "geeks" who purport to care about the future of the internet understood the value of a publicly reachable IP address. If more folks besides the big players had these, then the potential for reaching a holy grail of "decentralization" and "end-to-end", and all the wonderful things that would make possible, would be much greater. Instead, these "geeks" are led to believe that hyped workarounds like "the cloud", "webRTC", "IPv6", etc. will save the day. None of these workarounds should be necessary if you "own" a small block of public IP addresses. How does the price of these "IPs for sale" compare with what you pay AWS for an IP address you do not use?

by wilhil 13y ago

thirdsight 13y ago

Well if it wasn't for all the heel-dragging with IPv6, this wouldn't be a problem.

wilhil 13y ago
IPv6 just won't happen fully any time soon... People are just kidding themselves. Too many "big" networks have admins who don't update their knowledge and are clueless about IPv6 - At some events where I see network admins, you can ask simple questions and judging by their body language, you know they are guessing/are clueless about IPv6. On top of this, some really high end network equipment that is still available now from some (high end) vendors is not 100% IPv6 compliant or has weird bugs, and, if network admins have recommended this equipment, they feel uncomfortable telling people it isn't up to scratch after their companies have invested significant money... so... this just makes the whole process stall. (Personal experience, not from the current job!) IPv6 is the future, but, being realistic, I don't see it happening any time soon.
- growse 13y ago
  Except it's happening right now. Google's chart of percentage of requests coming over IPv6 shows that usage rate is accelerating: http://www.google.com/ipv6/statistics.html http://www.google.com/ipv6/statistics.html And my personal experience is the opposite - most 'big' networks are fully IPv6 capable (both in terms of equipment and staff), there's just no business case to enable it for many of them because of the lack of capability on home (consumer-grade) equipment.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- ghshephard 13y ago
  There are some reasons why IPv6 will take until 2015 until we start to see substantial adoption, but technician knowledge isn't one of them. Any competent IPv4 network engineer can come up to speed on IPv6 in a single one-week class. The major reason why we aren't seeing adoption is that there is no commercial need - that's the real driver.
  - TranceMan 13y ago
    anecdotal but in a presentation given by the head network architect at a large (ex national) uk communication provider - training engineers is the main reason ipv6 has not been rolled out.
    - ay 13y ago
      It's a pretty good excuse. But not a good reason anymore.
  - yaantc 13y ago
    > The major reason why we aren't seeing adoption is that > there is no commercial need - that's the real driver. Not entirely true. All big networks using private IP addresses and NAT (recent ISPs, and most cellular networks for example) have to implement carrier grade NAT (CGN), and it's getting painful and costly. Also, a lot of web applications require low latency. The way to do this is often to create a lot of parallel connections to fetch content. For example, a google map can easily span 40+ TCP connection to fetch all the tiles making the MAP. During peak time this can put a very high load on CGN gateways. And when they overload, some sessions lags or time out (missing or delayed tiles => bad user experience). This is why all big players on the web now support IPv6 and use it when possible. IPv6 avoid CGN and does not have such issues. Even if that still makes a small percentage of all traffic, it's steadily rising now. IPv6 is finally happening, because the alternative (CGN) is too painful to scale. Now old large ISP with little growth don't care: they have plenty of public IPv4 addresses, with enough in stock to absorb their limited growth for a while. So they don't need CGN and don't care about IPv6. I don't expect this to change. But with mobile and cellular getting a bigger and bigger share and mostly on NAT with IPv4 there is enough of a pressure to move to IPv6 to make sure it'll be mainstream by the end of the decade.

mino 13y ago

I share your pain, bro :) Although, two corrections: 1) prices are, in my experience, lower than what you quoted: around 10-12 $/IP, depending on the subnet size. 2) RIPE is indeed encouraging the marketplace model: it is seen as a mechanism to move resources to LIRs that need them the most, with the side effect of increasing IP efficiency. Also, to note: 4) Since some time, there is a policy proposal [1] to allow intra-RIR transfers to/from RIPE. I'm not aware on whether there is such a proposal within ARIN, which currently allows only transfers to/from APNIC (not very useful if you're american... addresses in APNIC ended a long time ago!). 5) RIPE currently operates in a "emergency policy" that allows a /22 to new registrants and a /24 to new members. ARIN will follows the same policy as soon as they remain with a single /8 left (probably around May-June 2014). 6) I always like to give a link to the very informative exhaustion graph of Geoff Huston [3] :) [1] http://www.ripe.net/ripe/policies/proposals/2012-03 http://www.ripe.net/ripe/policies/proposals/2012-03 [2] https://www.arin.net/resources/request/transfers_8_4.html https://www.arin.net/resources/request/transfers_8_4.html [3] http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/index.html http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/index.html

wilhil 13y ago
Sorry, meant $ instead of £... I have seen a few prices much much higher from some smaller places (one Eastern European ISP trying to sell a /24 for $40 each), I guess trying to make a quick bit of cash.... but I think $10-$12 as you said is more usual for larger purchases.

rplnt 13y ago

> The guidelines state that when you are not using an IP, you simply hand it back Maybe that's why ISPs hand out public IP addresses like nothing?

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

cpach 13y ago

Wouldn’t it be better if IANA or the regional Internet registries directly rented out the IP addresses to the ISP:s/companies who need them? Why let a middle-man collect the profits?

wilhil 13y ago
Awkward to say... These companies (at least RIPE) are non profit making - you join for a fixed fee and then you get as many IPs as you need. It would be a good idea on one hand and a pain on the other... I am trying to think of a counter to it in my head, but, I can't really... a small fee is easily absorbed in per user costs and so many companies use public ips for internal routing when a private ip would do a good job... Then again, you could get big companies asking to rent out more than they need and refusing to hand back... Even if there was fool proof way of provisioning and managing, I personally think it is far too late to do it :(
bradleyjg 13y ago
Yes. Best would be a formula that increased the per ip cost the more ips you had. That would have at least two advantages: first it would pressure the legacy class A holders who are collectively sitting on 100M+ not publicly used addresses; second it would make it unprofitable to hoard and resell. The current method resembles water law in the US western states, which is just about the worst possible way to allocate access to a limited resource.
noselasd 13y ago
Bit to late for that, and the people that already got the IP addresses are unlikely to give them back. The internet is basically the sum of all the BGP routes sitting around on routers, it's unlikely any single organization could have much success trying to reclaim and redistribute those addresses.

gwu78 13y ago

"It really annoys me that this side of the industry doesn't get more exposure!" If only more self-proclaimed "geeks" who purport to care about the future of the internet understood the value of a publicly reachable IP address. If more folks besides the big players had these, then the potential for reaching a holy grail of "decentralization" and "end-to-end", and all the wonderful things that would make possible, would be much greater. Instead, these "geeks" are led to believe that hyped workarounds like "the cloud", "webRTC", "IPv6", etc. will save the day. None of these workarounds should be necessary if you "own" a small block of public IP addresses. How does the price of these "IPs for sale" compare with what you pay AWS for an IP address you do not use?