John, On Jul 25, 2007, at 1:14 PM, John Curran wrote:
All the existing big businesses can operate with what they already have, Google and Yahoo are not going to face any sort of crisis for the foreseeable future. And as I've been saying for a while and Randy put in his presentation, supply and demand will simply cause the cost of having public IPs to go up from zero to something tiny - enough to see IPs being put back into the pool to those who really need them. Putting them back into circulation doesn't work unless its done in very large chucks to major ISPs. If this isn't the model followed, then we will see a lot more routes for the equivalent number of new customers. People complaining about the ability to carry both IPv6 and IPv4 routing need to think carefully about how long we'll actually last if the ISP's are injecting thousands of unaggregatable routes from recovered address space each day.
Been there, done that, got several t-shirts. Longer prefixes _will_ hit the routing system. ISPs will react by (re-)implementing prefix length filters. Many people will whine.
Additionally, the run rate for IPv4 usage approximates 10 /8 equivalents per year and increasing. Even given great legacy recovery, you've only gained a few more years and then still have to face the problem.
This assumes consumption patterns remain the same which is, I believe, naive. In a world where you have to pay non-trivial amounts for address space utilization, people will only use the address space they actually need and you'll see even more proliferation of NAT for client-only services. Rgds, -drc