At 10:04 AM -0500 7/25/07, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
The 73 "Xtra Large" LIRs that consume 79% of ARIN's v4 space today are paying no more than USD 0.03 per IP per year. That's not quite zero, but it's close enough the effect is the same. Until the cost of v4 space to these folks is more than a rounding error, they have absolutely no incentive to conserve. It doesn't matter what the other 2550 LIRs do because they're insignificant factors in overall consumption.
In every region, there are major carriers that: 1) Require additional addresses for new customer connections, 2) Must exchange routes with all other DFZ players and cannot meaningfully filter when they want to announce the same routes, 3) Currently add many, many new customers for each additional routing table entry in the DFZ. This model does have tolerable scaling characteristics (which are retained if IPv6 blocks are used for the same purpose in the future). These providers do have motivation to conserve, but also compete for customers. You're not going to see major ISP's moving to one DMZ IP address for new customers (even with higher "costs"), since their conservation efforts will impact new sales. If people really want such changes to slow down utilization, it's going to take policy. /John