On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 8:11 AM, Andrew Elliott <andrellio@yahoo.com> wrote:
How much are SP's charging and what are the thresholds? What are default allocations based on? (ie: size of the circuit, type of product, etc...)
For IPv4, there are policies provided by ARIN for this; they come from RFC 2050. To be in compliance with registry addressing policies, SPs and anyone else acting as a LIR have to apply a utilization criterion, for anything /29 or larger, at least, and collect documentation such as network designs and contact details from their downstream user (for SWIP or RWHOIS), and the utilization criterion is how the amount of IP space that the ISP is allowed to delegated is determined. There is no provision or thing allowed called "pay for IP addresses". You either have the unique hosts to justify that many IPs or you don't. If you don't have the hosts and justified need, an SP can't sell you as many IPs as you like. However, if a SP has very little IP address space left to allocate, going forward, the SPs with no IPs left are likely to limit allocations they would make without additional payment to subscribers of low margin products, to a smaller delegation than could be allowed or justified by the utilization criterion. The availability and cost of IP addresses through ARIN 8.3 Specified Transfer arrangements is likely to have a major effect: if the approximate "cost for an IP address" by specified transfer is low enough, it will give an SPs a convenient number they can say they need to charge for IP addresses (which SPs may just roll into the cost of service, with possible discounts to networks bringing their own IPs). If the specified transfer market is reasonably stable in pricing and availability of IPs, under those circumstances you could see a "price per IP" begin to appear. I don't think there are any 'hard and fast' thresholds. But a SP is not likely to currently delegate a /24 for the average home DSL or 20 meg Ethernet user, for example, even if they've got 200 hosts. Without additional negotiation and payment (unless that's some really expensive 10 meg service.) If IPs are that scarce, that user (to get a /24) for example, is ultimately going to need to pay enough to make up for the lost opportunity to sell products that require a unique IP addresses which would not be tied up if that user didn't get the entire /24. Some SPs might even need to start reviewing subdelegations they already made, to verify the utilization criterion is still met, or increase prices for the service, based on opportunity costs due to utilized IP addresses, if they are short on IPs and could use them to sell more product, or profit by disposing of the IPs via disaggregating their block and listing on the specified transfer market.... -- -JH