In a recent report from the IETF meeting there was a discussion of considering IPv4 “Historic” from a protocols perspective. Geoff Huston notes his commentary in one of his recent posts. Spoiler alert: I for one think its a little to early to consider something that is actively used by billions of devices every day “historic”…
APNIC 41 with APRICOT in Auckland, NZ
I recently returned from the APNIC meeting in Auckland, New Zealand. Here are a few notes and highlights from the meeting.
IPv4 Transfer Panel
A interactive panel on current trends in the IPv4 transfer market.
Alain Duran (ICANN Research) – IPv4 market might be considered concentrated depending on how you slice the data. The RIRs are reporting transfers in different formats and different fields and this is hindering analysis. Most transfers are happening in the region, but some are moving between the regions (ARIN is a net exporter). Most of the addresses that are being transferred are “old” ones that were issued more than 20 years ago. (copy)
Geoff Huston (APNIC) – The largest transfers are happening in the ARIN region. More than 58M addresses were transferred globally in 2015. There is a difference between what we see in the routing table for transfers vs. what is recorded in the registry. We don’t have a good way to measure the amount of addresses that are being Leased/Rented. We also can’t measure how many devices are behind NATs. Transfers aren’t making a difference in the route-table growth. (copy)
Sandra Brown (IPv4 Market Group) – Sandra that price will still rise, but is currently being depressed due to the large blocks (/8’s) coming to market. Price differentials between regions have largely disappeared since inter-RIR transfers have started with RIPE. Using the /16 as a base size block, pricing bottomed out in Sept 2015 at about $5/IPv4 address and is now in the $7-8 range for /16s. (copy)
Gabe Fried (HilcoStreambank) – Only 1/3 of large “Elephant” transactions have been recorded with the registry. Smaller blocks command price premiums, so some holders are choosing to break up their blocks and slowly sell them over the course of a year generating additional value to the current block holder. Largest transactions (Option Agreements): Buyer pays at closing, seller keeps the block until the buyer is ready to transfer, buyer retains the right to direct the seller to transfer the blocks to a specific receiver at a future time. 10% of the volume of addresses are direct transfers constituting 96% of transfer transactions. The remaining 4% of the transactions are 90% of the address transfer volume. (copy)
Q&A period included discussions about how Letters of Authority (LOAs) are being used to route blocks. Organizations should really check to see if people are really authorized to advertise blocks. There was some discussion about if reassignment records be used to record renting and leasing records? How can we bring more transparency to the industry for options contracts and leasing/renting issues.
Address policy working group (Policy sig)
All formal action items were resolved before the meeting; 2 policies were implemented recently: Prop-113 & Prop-114
Prop-113 – new minimum assignment criteria, for a /24
- Currently multihomed
- Currently using a /24 and intends to multihome
- Plans to multihome with 6 months
Prop-114 – new ASN assignment criteria
- Currently multihomed OR have previous allocated PI space and intend to multihome in the future
2 new proposals submitted were not accepted by chairs:
First proposal submitted allowed aggregation of /21 approvals instead of /22 from 103/8 and /22 from other pool.
Second proposal submitted required whois contact email should be validated once per month.
Prop-105 – IANA returns pool – allows an organization to get another /22
The IANA returns pool is depleting. The non-103/8 pool is for a second /22 per organization. The pool will deplete soon likely in April/May 2016. March will add a /15. September will add an /18. Recovered blocks, if any, go into this pool as well. When the pool depletes, it’s going to bounce a few times as it gets repeatedly depleted and then refilled. Secretariat proposed at the Jakarta meeting the creation of a waiting list for this pool. The staff has started working on implementation of the wait-list which will be based on a strict order of request.
BGP route Hijacking
Interesting presentation about blocks that are being hijacked and the methods (fraudulently prepared LOAs) to get the blocks routed. Don’t trust LOAs, they are sometimes not worth the “paper” they are written on.
BGP Hijack Issue on Nov 6 2015
Some hijackings are causing a race to the bottom of announcing everything as /24s in some cases. This could have longer-term issues if this type of behavior became the norm rather than a transient exception.
vizAS
APNIC has a new tool that one can use to visualize ASN data.
IP Addressing 2015
Geoff Huston recently released his 2015 report on IP addressing. Here are a few notes from the larger report.
- AfriNIC is the only RIR which continues to have an IPv4 free pool available
- ARIN exhausted its free pool in mid-2015 and is now only allocating small blocks from an IPv6 transition pool
- IPv4 transfers continue to increase with 3,643 transfers recorded in 2015 which is more than double from 2014
- The volume of IPv4 transfers almost tripled in 2015 to 58,309,888 IPv4 addresses
- Carrier-grade NAT (CGN) and other NAT applications continue to dampen the real demand for IPv4 addresses
- IPv6 allocations continue to hold steady with 4,733 allocations made in 2015
IPv4 address exports in Romania
Here at the the RIPE 71 meeting in Bucharest, Romania. A very interesting presentation was given by one of the IP address brokers about the large scale export of IPv4 addresses from Romania.
According to data from RIPE and Cipiran Nica, 66% of all exported addresses in the RIPE region are from Romania. RO had 13.5M addresses before runout, then exported 5.2 M or more than 1/3 of the total addresses in the country. By contrast the next largest exporter in the region, Germany, was the source of 14% of the RIPE transfers. This 14%, however, constituted less than 2% of total addresses registered in Germany.
This export has always seemed a bit of an oddity since it was noted in earlier blog post from Dyn earlier in 2015.
The presentation at the meeting revealed some of the on the ground details that are not easily explained by the statistics themsevles. The primary reason so many of these addresses came on to the market was that a majority of the addresses in the country were being rented or were previously used for spam. Prior to IPv4 exhaustion many RO companies rented addresses due to the cost of becoming a LIR. Additionally, there has been consolidation of the ISPs in the region and as these smaller ISPs were taken over the addreses were returned to the LIRs. These are the addresses that went into the transfer market along with addresses that were obtained mostly for companies which were doing snowshoe spam. The addresses which were used for spam constituted 68% of exported addresses. Approximately 30% of the addresses were from formerly rented addresses.
Estimates of actual IPv4 usage from the top 5 companies companies in Romania show that about 4.2M addresses are being used to conver 95% of the Internet access customers in the country.
It will be interesting to see if this large scale export of IPv4 resources will have a negative effect on the longer term. A number of the largest providers here are quite agressive in their IPv6 rollouts, but even those require IPv4 to be able to connect end users to the rest of the predominantly IPv4 Internet.
ARIN 36 Public Policy Preview
Next week is the ARIN 36 meeting in Montreal. Here is my look ahead at the some of the policies being discussed at the meetings. There are two recommended drafts that will be discussed along with nine other draft policies. If you aren’t going to be there in person check out the remote participation options.
2015-1 IPv6 Initial End-User Assignments (Recommended Draft)
Policy Summary: This recommended draft policy allows organizations which have 13 different sites to qualify for an /40 IPv6 block.
Discussion: This policy is intended to aid the widespread adoption and stabilization of IPv6 by allowing small organizations to obtain a permanent block of IPv6 addresses rather than having to obtain a block from their upstream provider. There has been little opposition to this policy change and I expect it to move forward to Last-Call.
2015-4 Modify 8.2 section to better reflect how ARIN handles reorganizations (Recommended Draft)
Policy Summary: This recommended draft policy clarifies existing staff practice regarding reorganizations. It explicitly notes that a needs-test is not required for reorganizations.
Discussion: This policy was created by the AC after a Policy Experience Report noted that the current policy is causing some confusion by the membership. The AC originally consider this as a possible editorial change, but decided that it was best to put this policy through the entire policy process. There has been no opposition to this codification of existing practice. I expect this policy to move forward to Last-Call.
2014-14 Remove Needs Test on Small Transfers
2014-14 Policy Summary: This draft policy removes needs testing from blocks which are smaller than /20 and permits an organization to have one needs-free transfer per year as long as a corporate officer attests to the organizations need of the addresses.
Discussion: This policy was rewritten extensively, largely by myself, with input from members of the AC. When the policy was returned to the list the new text seems to have fallen flat without much discussion. In my mind this means I have crafted text that now appeals to very few because it makes great compromises between the two sides of the argument for and against needs testing in the transfer market, or people don’t think this type of policy will solve the problems that exist in the current transfer market. I suspect this policy will likely be abandoned by the AC following the meeting. Hopefully, at least we have a robust discussion about what types of policy changes are needed as ARIN moves to mostly processing transfers rather than issuing addresses from the IPv4 free pool.
2015-2 Inter-RIR Transfers to Specified Recipients
Policy Summary: This policy allows an organization which receives a transfer in the ARIN region to transfer it to another RIR within 24 months of receiving the transfer.
Discussion: The policy is intended to benefit large organizations which receive a block via transfer in the ARIN region and then want to transfer it to a subsidiary or other entity in another region. (There is however no restriction in the existing text that it be a subsidiary.) Some have not supported this policy as it is a “workaround” for broken geolocation issues. Furthermore some have opposed this as they see potential for increased address market speculation.
2015-3 Remove 30 day utilization requirement in end-user IPv4 policy
Policy Summary: This draft policy remove the 30 day usages requirement for IPv4 end-users.
Discussion: This policy is intended to remove what has been considered an onerous requirement on end-users. Under current policy an end-users is supposed to put 25% of their block into use with 30 days, based upon a 1 year allocation. This requirement has always been very hard for organizations to meet and has skewed the allocation sizes downward. With end-users now forced to obtain assignments via the transfer market, this policy provision is much less relevant.
2015-6 Transfers and Multi-national Networks
Policy Summary: This two policy drafts are followups to the previous policy 2014-1 Out of Region use.
Discussion: 2015-5 is a rewrite of the original 2014-1 policy but with the an expanded definition of nexus to determine if an organization should be allowed to obtain address blocks from ARIN. 2015-6 is a different look at the same problem and approach it by looking only at the transfer market. In 2015-6, the policy instructs ARIN to ignore where addresses are utilized when processing transfers. Currently ARIN only considers a block utilized if a covering route is announced in the ARIN region and the usual utilization requirements have been met.
There has been quite a bit of discussion on these two items and previous policy it will be interesting to see if either or both of them obtain enough support to move them forward to be a recommended policy at a future meeting.
2015-7 Simplified requirements for demonstrated need for IPv4 transfers
Policy Summary: Replaces the needs test for transfers with an officer’s attestation to 50% use within 24 months.
Discussion: This policy is intended to loosen the transfer requirements, but leave the other transfer qualification methods intact in case an organization want to use them.
2015-8 Reassignment records for IPv4 End-Users
Policy Summary: Allows end-user organizations to add reassignment records to the ARIN database.
Discussion: Reassignment records can be used for a number of different functions which could benefit the overall desire to increase database accuracy by allowing organizations to add additional details in the database. This policy has been weakly supported on the list, but it will be interesting to see if it gathers more support at the meeting.
2015-9 Eliminating needs-based evaluation for Section 8.2, 8.3, and 8.4 transfers
Policy Summary: Removes needs-based testing from the transfer policy.
Discussion: This policy has been supported and not supported by the “usual” sides in this debate. It is unclear if anything has changes substantially at this point such that a policy like this could move forward.
2015-10 Minimum IPv6 Assignments
Policy Summary: Sets a utilization “floor” to encourage ISPs to give users an adequate IPv6 allocation per the IETF guidelines.
Discussion: This policy is supported by those who believe that ISPs will not issue large enough blocks (e.g. /56 or larger) to end users. Statements of non-support have been seen by operators who note that how they provision their network with their users is a organizational decision, not a registry and public policy issue.
2015-11 Remove transfer language which only applied pre-exhaustion of IPv4 pool
Policy Summary: Removes language in the policy manual which was used prior to IPv4 exhaustion.
Discussion: This policy is intended to cleanup the policy manual by removing language that is no longer applicable because the policy conditions under which policy sections were slated to be used are no longer applicable.