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AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

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Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#41

Post by qingcharles »

petarb wrote: post #20

Can someone please ELI5?

The Internet is built on what is called version 4 of Internet Protocol, which when they designed it allotted 4Bn total IP addresses. Each device on the Internet would be able to have one IP and 4Bn would be more than enough for the whole of Planet Earth.

Fast forward a couple of decades and everyone needs 10 IPs each. You have your phone, your laptop, your work computer, your TV, your door lock, your door bell camera, your thermostat, etc. And every web site in the world traditionally needed its own IP. And so the world pretty much ran out of those 4Bn addresses.

The "Powers That Be" developed IPv6 which solves this, but not everything works properly yet when connecting with IPv6, so if you want to make sure your software/hardware is guaranteed to connect to everything then you need one of those precious IPv4 addresses.

Now, in the early days of the Internet there were so many addresses that they were handed out like Halloween candy. And many people had so many they didn't even use a fraction of them. So now you can make good money selling your old addresses as they are prime real estate.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#44

Post by qingcharles »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #12
tamrix wrote: post #11

I can promise you no one is paying $35 per IPv4 address.

People who need them on short notice often pay more. The rent AWS collects on their IPv4s also pays that off in a year, I think.

How much does Amazon charge? I pay about 50 Euro cents a month to Hetzner for mine.

I've tried running web servers as pure IPv6 plays, which I would happily, happily prefer. It is just not possible. Even things I'm convinced will work, like cellphones, which are mostly IPv6 these days, won't connect.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#45

Post by qingcharles »

leoh wrote: post #31

fwiw, ATT charges me $15 for ~8 fixed ipv4 addresses on my gigabit plan. Even if we amortize against the total monthly bill of $113, we get ~$15 per IP. EDIT: I guess this is the cost to _rent_ an IP per month and not the cost of _owning_ an IPv4 address.

Right. I pay about 50 Euro cents per month for each of mine, so my provider gets about $10 a year let's say. Which means they'll pay for themselves in 3 years on average, after that it's all profit, assuming they are still useful.

At some point. At SOME point, IPv6 will work in enough situations that we can ignore the small minority of situations where it doesn't. If even 90% of the visitors to my web sites could connect on IPv6 I would change tomorrow, but it just isn't that high yet.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#46

Post by Something1234 »

015a wrote: post #40
atyvr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yah, it certainly seems like maybe that was peak pricing. This write up has some more data on historical pricing https://www.ipxo.com/blog/ipv4-price-history/ I've also heard folks pay quite a bit over the average price for novelty IP addresses, so perhaps that skewed the data? I'd love to be able to buy 2.2.2.0/23 or my favorite 42.42.42.0/24

Yeah, one example is Cloudflare and 1.1.1.1; though the story behind that is less about money and far more interesting. Apparently, APNIC had owned 1.1.1.1 for, basically, forever, but were never able to actually use it for anything because it caught so much garbage traffic. Cloudflare is one of only a handful of service providers that could announce the IP and handle the traffic; so in exchange for helping APNIC's r…

I would really like to see the results of this research to understand what is going on there.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#47

Post by pclmulqdq »

qingcharles wrote: post #44
pclmulqdq wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who need them on short notice often pay more. The rent AWS collects on their IPv4s also pays that off in a year, I think.

How much does Amazon charge? I pay about 50 Euro cents a month to Hetzner for mine. I've tried running web servers as pure IPv6 plays, which I would happily, happily prefer. It is just not possible. Even things I'm convinced will work, like cellphones, which are mostly IPv6 these days, won't connect.

AWS charges $0.005 per IP per hour. Multiplied by 8760 hours, you get about $44/year at 100% utilization.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#48

Post by azlev »

Gigachad wrote: post #5

Hopefully hosting providers putting an actual price on v4 usage will be the push that gets things rolling to v6.

I don't like this solution because it will cost me money and time to setup myself a modem that can handle properly ipv6 or switch to a more expensive provider.

Send the bill to end users is not what should be done.

All this ipv6 endeavour already cost me a lot of time learning and troubleshooting software, and sometimes realizing that some modems doesn't have a good ipv6 stack and the best solution is to turn it off.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#49

Post by toast0 »

candiddevmike wrote: post #23
yla92 wrote: post #17

Some noob questions here. How does one buy a block of IPv4 as an individual? (If that's allowed) After you purchase it, how does it come into your possession? How do you utilize them?

1. You most likely can't. You typically need to prove to a numbering authority that you need that many IPs (minimum /24) for X reason and you will be multihomed (connected to two+ ISPs) by Y date. 2. You are assigned a BGP Autonomous System Number (ASN) as part of the process. The IPs are assigned to your ASN. 3. You sign a peering contract with ISPs and peer with them using BGP on your router. You use your ASN to an…

> 1. You most likely can't. You typically need to prove to a numbering authority that you need that many IPs (minimum /24) for X reason and you will be multihomed (connected to two+ ISPs) by Y date.

If you're asking for a minimum sized range, you don't have to justify more than one ip. It's not super hard to find somewhere where you can be multihomed either, although it's unlikely to be at your home. (Maybe ask isn't exactly the right verb, assuming ARIN/RIPE are out of addresses, you're asking for them to process a transfer that you paid/will pay the current responsible party for)

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#50

Post by jedberg »

jandrese wrote: post #26
jedberg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't run IPv6 on my home network. I try it about once a year, enabling it at the router (it's already enabled on my laptop). And then random stuff just doesn't work. Various websites hang, various widgets just don't load, etc. Then I turn it off and everything gets better again. I'be been too lazy to diagnose why exactly it doesn't work, I just figure it's easier to run with it off. At some point a website I reall…

You have some misconfiguration on your local network. It's hard to tell from your description, but I'd guess maybe you don't have the firewall rules configured for IPv6 or something. Breakage is extremely rare on the live web. I can't remember the last time I found a website that was only breaking on IPv6.

> You have some misconfiguration on your local network

I’m sure I do. But that’s sort of the point. I only use standard commercial hardware with the default config.

If that doesn’t work out of the box, what chance does someone who doesn't have my decades of networking experience have in fixing it?

Granted I’m probably more sensitive than most because I know what network issues look like. Most people probably just think some things are slow sometimes.

My ultimate point though is that this is probably a barrier to adoption.

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