[AusNOG] IPv4

[Mark Newton]

On 03/03/2013, at 18:14, Skeeve Stevens <skeeve+ausnog at eintellegonetworks.com> wrote:

> Was v4 allocations screwed? I don't know.  We didn't know what was going to happen 20 years ago...

Yeah we did. That's why we implemented CIDR in the early 1990s and got cracking on IPng.

Any suggestion that what's happening right now wasn't both foreseeable and actually foreseen 20 years ago is pretty revisionist!

I think that's why some of us are pretty relaxed about what's happening with IPv4 at the moment: we've all had a lot of time to come to grips with it, we've all made our predictions about how it'd play out, we all knew what'd happen if the industry didn't do anything about it. They didn't do anything about it, and now it's all coming true. It's not some kind of surprise that everyone is supposed to panic about, though.

Things will get a lot worse before they get better: CGNs have barely even begun to be deployed yet, and there'll be a whole mountain of pain, anguish and teeth gnashing coming from them when they're commonplace.

Meanwhile everyone keeps arguing about the last /8 as if it's important or something; in a world where you can get all the IPv4 address space you want by simply spending money on buying it. 

The price is currently low. Supply and demand will make the cost of acquiring IPv4 inexorably rise until it exceeds the cost of switching to IPv6, at which point demand will start to fall off, and a new equilibrium will be met. The price over time will look like a bell curve with a long tail, and we're juuuuust starting to climb the left hand side...

    - mark



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