Re: [Starlink] APNIC56 last week

[Ulrich Speidel <u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz>]

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.

-- 

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Dr. Ulrich Speidel

School of Computer Science

Room 303S.594 (City Campus)

The University of Auckland
u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
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