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@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.spei...@auckland.ac.nz
> http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
> ****************************************************************
>
>
>
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