[Starlink] APNIC56 last week

[Sebastian Moeller]

Hi Ulrich,


nice tangential discussion. I guess what we might expect is some "Kipp-Punkt"/tipping-point at which acquiring new IPv4 becomes cost prohibitive enough so new deployments go IPv6 only, at which point the existing IPv4 offers might devaluate pretty quickly... Now, if IPv6 would have been made more like IPv4 this would be considerably easier (I am thinking DHPCv6 and Android devices here, and I am only speaking of ease of deployment; I accept there are valid reasons for a SLAAC-only position like Android's). The US$1 million (or better 3.5 Million) question is when this tipping-point will be?
Tangent: German ISPs tend to charge ~5EUR/month extra for static public IPv4 addresses so over a typical 24 month contract period can easily tolerate a cost of 5*24 = 120 EUR for an IPv4 address (that will afterwards still be in the ISP's property). They typically provision either full DualStack (from the incumbent sitting on a large pile of IPv4s) or ds-lite and for a few unfortunate one's CG-NAT-IPv4 only. But even the IPv6 addresses/prefixes are typically dynamically assigned with relative short renewal periods (like 24 hours). 

Regards
	Sebastian


P.S.: My personal gripes with IPv6 are much smaller, I mostly miss stuff like ICMP timestamps in ICMPv6 and the IP timestamp option in IPv6*, or the fact that privacy extensions (as well intended as they are) make it harder for novice users to actually use their IPv6 globally routable addresses to make services available.

*) I think I understand the limitations of both ICMP and IP timestamps compared to the more elaborate alternatives that have been RFC'd as alternatives and that apparently convinced team IPv6 to not carry these things over from IPv4, but boy, no amount of higher temporal precision makes up for the point that many deployed servers today happily respond tp ICMP/IP timestamp requests, ubiquity in itself is a major asset.


> On Sep 23, 2023, at 12:53, Ulrich Speidel via Starlink <starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> 
> On 23/09/2023 4:22 pm, Noel Butler via Starlink wrote:
>> IPv6 is only 4% of traffic that hits my Mail Servers, it's less than 1% on my Web servers.
>> Just like TCP, it wont be going anywhere, not quietly, and if it were to, likely be long after I'm gone, QUIC seems an interesting project, and I guess only the decades ahead of us will tell of it becomes a raging success.
> 
> Now what that tells me is that you and those that use your mail / web servers are within networks that are either in networks that are old and have legacy IPv4 allocations, or that are new, desparate, and rich. And Geoff, if you asked him, would tell you that this is perfectly fine by him - as long as you're happy with it. In fact, I can recall a presentation of his not too long ago (APNIC54, AINTEC22?) where he said pretty much exactly that he didn't foresee a rapid demise of IPv4.
> 
> But if you look at the Internet as a whole - and Geoff does, in a very ingenious way, I might add - then we notice that the percentage of IPv6 out there has been growing steadily. IPv6 is now what about half of Internet users use. Maybe not the folk that visit your services, but Internet users nonetheless. So you're in the process of being outnumbered. But that's perhaps of academic interest only, for now, at least.
> 
> What's a bit more pertinent in some respects is a point that Vint brought up, and this is that if you want a new IPv4 address these days, you will generally need to buy it from someone who has an allocation. Or lease it - which is a little controversial, but not a debate I'm wanting to enter here. Let's stay with the buying price tag for a moment.
> 
> I came home from APNIC54 last year with the insight that my employer's /16 IPv4 allocation was worth around US$3.5 million. Since we've had the /16 for ages, I started wondering whether this was even on our asset list. I was pretty sure that it ought to be. Turns out it wasn't - when every $100 monitor in our place is. So I started asking questions and am told that there was a hastily arranged meeting between IT and Finance.
> 
> The upshot is that we now have a $3.5m asset on our books that may appreciate or depreciate, and people who are responsible for managing it. In fact, I dug a bit further and found a total of around NZ$100m worth of IPv4 addresses in NZ's public sector, including a /16 held by a government department that wasn't part of any AS. NZ's auditor general's office told me that they expected public sector agencies to list IPv4 holdings on their balance sheets.
> 
> Why is this important? Because otherwise, there is nothing that stops an individual with access to your RIR account from transferring your IPv4 holdings to whichever party they so desire. If the addresses are not on your asset list, then there's nothing that documents that you own the value that is inherent in them and thus nothing to sue anyone for. One imagines this as the ultimate stunt that a disgruntled sysadmin might pull off before they leave your employ.
> 
> But let's get back to that newly-found asset that we now have to manage. Your next CGNAT now becomes an investment in making that newly-found asset a little less tradable. A bit like putting a shiny new building right onto the only access way to your back sections you've just been told you can actually develop.
> 
> Of course, this only applies to folk who sit on larger address blocks - for a /24, it won't make much of a difference on the balance sheet.
> 
> -- 
> 
> ****************************************************************
> Dr. Ulrich Speidel
> 
> School of Computer Science
> 
> Room 303S.594 (City Campus)
> 
> The University of Auckland
> u.speidel at auckland.ac.nz
> http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
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