[address-policy-wg] "needs", last /8, ... (Was: Transfer Requirements for IPv4 Allocations)

On Fri, 24 Apr 2015, Radu-Adrian FEURDEAN wrote:

> Again, *more* liberal, does not mean *most* liberal. There's a huge gap 
> between the policies in force 13/09/2012 and before and the ones in 
> force 14/09/2012 and after. This what I would like to see fixed. Could 
> any of you have your company survive with only a /22 (and 10-15 $/IP 
> extra, 256/512/1024 packs towards 15$/IP) ?

It all depends on the size of the company. You can comfortably serve 
around 50-100 residential customers per IPv4 address behind NAT444. Let's 
say you give each customer 512 ports, that gives you around 120 users per 
IPv4 address.

Let's now say you allocate 3 /24:s for this use, meaning you can service 
75-80k users out of this space that you acquired for a total TCO for 3 
years of (if I remember correctly, 6kEUR in LIR costs). I'd say that if 
you can't bear 6kEUR over 3 years for 75k users, you're doing something 
wrong.

The same model of course doesn't work if you're a VPS provider and require 
a unique IPv4 address per customer server. Then you're going to have to 
buy addresses to get what you need if you're any significant size.

So whilst I do appreciate that you have actually presented something 
resembling a beginning of a proposal (compared to a lot of other people 
earlier in this thread), your model needs a cut-off somewhere where the 
company size "need" is now less valuable than the small company "need". 
Where do you draw the line? How do you define need?

With the current policy we have reached consensus that we'll allow a /22 
for new entrants, and if you need more, then you need to buy the addresses 
on the market. This means someone really small might get too many 
addresses, correct, and it means someone who is growing, will soon join 
the larger players in having to cope with "lack of enough IPv4 space". 
Yes, just like the housing market, it is unfair that the 80 year old lady 
is sitting in a 3 bedroom apartment with no mortgage whilst the family of 
four where both parents are working have to make do with a 1 bedroom 
apartment because they can't afford to buy a larger one. Unfortunately, 
there is no great way to handle this unfairness.

So, your skeleton of a proposal needs a bit more thought and meat on the 
bone before we can actually discuss it. Where do you draw the line? How do 
we make sure small new entrants can still get IPv4 space in 5-10 years 
(because there is consensus that we want this to be possible), while still 
making current policy more permissive to handing smallish blocks on 
"needs" basis (whatever that might be). Also take into account the 
generally there is consensus that we don't want people to be able to use 
administrative loopholes in order to get themselves more IPv4 addresses 
for instance through multiple LIRs and other methods, at least not 
substantially under current market prices for IPv4 addresses.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se