General

The Closing of the Internet Frontier

IP addresses are running out, and companies are fighting for unclaimed Internet real estate. There is a solution—we discuss whether IPv6 is right for you, and show you how IPv6 real estate is bought and sold.

by Niall Richard Murphy Senior Consultant, Enigma Consulting [March 8, 2001]

What they objected to was arbitrary obstacles, artificial limitations upon the freedom of each member of this frontier folk to work out his own career without fear or favor.
— Frederick Jackson Turner

The majority of small and medium-sized ISPs that simply receive IP address allocations from their upstream provider see only a fraction of the suffering that IPv4 (mis)management is causing. Sure, there are occasionally problems when addresses are needed quickly for a big new customer, but a good business relationship with the upstream helps greatly.

Hey, these days, you can still get away with sticking a NAT gateway in front and giving the poor customer only a handful of addresses for their router interfaces and the NAT gateway itself. (Some customers will even thank you for doing this, thinking that you have improved their network security.)

Diminishing global resources
However, if you are serious about your Internet connectivity, being connected to multiple ISPs, which in turn have multiple paths of their own to the greater Internet, is a necessity. And for that, you've got to have your own address blocks or routing prefixes, which are advertised around the world by your upstreams.

If you are making the difficult step from small ISP to multihomed ISP then you will have to go to one of the regional Internet registries (RIRs) and apply for your own address block assignment. The American RIR is ARIN, and the European one is RIPE. (There are others for the Asia-Pacific region, Africa, and so on.)

Both of these RIRs will charge you for the privilege of having your own address space, although it should be pointed out that they are not selling the address space itself, but rather membership in an representative organisation. Also, the size of the address space that you get from them depends not only on what you ask for, but also the efficiency of your current usage.

Since IPv4 addresses are such a scarce resource, expect to prepare a comprehensive network plan showing your existing IP address usage, together with projected usage for at least two years, and expect to have this thoroughly reviewed, perhaps even checked against reality.

One good technique for preparing such a plan (which I have used) is to prepare a list of types of network equipment together with how many units of each there are, together with what kind of address space those units need. Excel may or may not be a good tool for this; I've had qualified success with using it in the past. Simply itemising each kind of address-requiring entity often makes it easy to see what will grow in your future network.

If you can, conserve address space in your plan (perhaps by only supporting name-based virtual hosts, perhaps by using private addressing wherever possible). The RIR will thank you, the Internet will thank you, I will thank you—and if an RIR feels well-disposed towards you, your application will naturally be treated with more alacrity.

For startup ISPs, the situation is different only in that your current network plan reads zero for all categories, and you had better be sure that you are going to your RIR for the right reasons (multihoming!) rather than to your upstream.

At the end of this process, which in Europe can take up to two or even three months (admittedly three is a worst case scenario), the RIR in question will assign you address space and charge you for the privilege: roughly $2,500 in America, and EUR3,000 in Europe. If you are a startup, the assignment will be of some minimum size (at the moment a /20, roughly 4,000 addresses) and you demonstrate your suitability to be awarded more address space by competent management of what you were originally assigned.

Some RIRs offer courses to their members on how to do this kind of thing efficiently. Give your IP assignment staff a free trip to Amsterdam—the whole company will benefit. The RIRs also tend to be run the way Internet organisations should—consensus between members driving working procedures. Some of them even reduce their fees from time to time!

The bigger they are
That's all very well for the small to medium sized providers, but what about the large companies that really need all the address space they can get?

In many cases such companies have already obtained enough IP address space already, or if they haven't, they have a private numbering scheme internally and sufficent NAT gateways to make it all work. There is really only one type of ISP that is in the awkward situation of being a startup yet having a need for millions of addresses, and that is (tah-dah) the mobile telephone company.

In Europe, the specter of millions of mobile phones requiring globally valid addresses has already produced some less-than-pleasant interactions between the RIRs and prospective members. BT Cellnet famously requested several /8's (upwards of 16 million addresses) for their GPRS project in one RIPE meeting not so long ago. Needless to say, the members asked the representative in question to rethink his application, and a workable compromise, made up of various combinations of private addressing and NAT, is nearly at hand.

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