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AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

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Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#71

Post by wincy »

oasisbob wrote: post #57
Something1234 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://labs.ripe.net/author/franz/pollution-in-18/

That’s pretty cool. I’d never though about bogons and debogonizing before, it’s like chasing off all the squatters on your property and more keep coming. You need some fat pipes and beefy servers to be able to handle all the bogus traffic of machines trying to hit your server, and also be able to actually fulfill your purpose.

Make sense now why Cloudflare would be one of the only companies that could handle it!

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#72

Post by dopa42365 »

atyvr wrote: post #2

correct, direct url is https://toonk.io/aws-ipv4-estate-now-worth-4-5-billion/index... More interestingly, perhaps, is a forward look at how much new revenue AWS will generate once AWS starts charging ($44 per IP per year) as of 2024. I think it's not unlikely that AWS will generate a few hundred million to a billion in additional revenue with this new charge.

Hetzner charges 2€ per month or so for a v4 address already (optional of course).

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#74

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

qingcharles wrote: post #41
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…

> 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.

Your phone perhaps, but the rest of these devices never need a public IP address.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#75

Post by frutiger »

LilBytes wrote: post #66
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.

My ISP has one of the better options where you can permanently lease an IPv4 address for a deposit of $100 AUD. The lease is indefinite, and when you don't want it any more you get the $100 back.

> you get the $100 back.

It doesn’t account for inflation?

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#76

Post by frutiger »

nfRfqX5n wrote: post #30

Extremely surprised that I could load that massive json list of ips on my phone instantly

I agree.

But in some sense it’s even more wonderful that your phone can (probably) render 1080p60 video without skipping a beat. Not to mention that it is transmitted over thin air, originating from someone (probably) thousands of miles away.

And even more wonderful is that no one thinks of it as anything special, at all.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#77

Post by costco »

kxrm wrote: post #63
Narkov wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go on...what are people paying then? More or less?

If you are willing to wait, you pay nothing. However, let's keep in mind that this evaluation is based on the private transfer market place for IPv4s not based on actual RIR costs. You must be an RIR member to hold IPs and there are membership dues that you must pay each year to maintain your allocation. Once you are a member of an RIR you just have to make a request and at least with ARIN that request and fulfillmen…

But the wait is long and everyone is rationing addresses so any free allocation is unlikely to be very large.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#78

Post by kmeisthax »

irrational wrote: post #67
malikNF wrote: post #65

Question for the networking folk here. How can the rest of us help move things over to ipv6?

I’ve been hearing about ipv4 running out and the need to move to ipv6 for so many years/decades, but it keeps not happening. I’m wondering if anything will change in my lifetime.

IPv4 ran out a decade ago, the only reason why it continues to work at all is because of two things:

- Compatibility bridges for v6-only hosts to connect to v4 servers

- The IP address market encouraging old v4 allocation owners to sell off their space (at the expense of a bloated routing table)

In 2009, IANA and the RIRs created a process for buying and selling IP addresses. Which is something they never wanted to allow, but their hand was forced by the abysmal levels of v6 adoption back then. Two years later IANA would allocate the last /8s, and the RIRs that got those allocations would exhaust them in the years following[1]. The only virgin v4 address space remaining is reserved specifically for ISPs setting up v4 compatibility for native v6 networks.

You did not notice this because the v6 transition has already happened, and it was boring. In 2023, Google reports 40-45% v6 adoption[0]. This is largely due to LTE making v6 a mandatory feature. Had we kept mobile traffic on v4, networks would've adopted shedloads of CGNAT, and even then that hits a wall when you start running out of ephemeral ports to disguise addressing information inside of. This would have resulted in significantly worse behavior for smartphone users, especially in heavily populated countries like India (which have far higher v6 utilization).

[0] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=ipv6...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#79

Post by depereo »

raverbashing wrote: post #70
015a wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So, what happened to everything that expected 1.1.1.1 to error out and now is getting something? (not worried about them, just curious)

Well, a lot of Cisco wireless engineers had to reconfigure their guest wifi captive portals.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#80

Post by stephen_g »

raverbashing wrote: post #70
015a wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So, what happened to everything that expected 1.1.1.1 to error out and now is getting something? (not worried about them, just curious)

I mean, for smaller routers that had static routes set for that subnet, it would probably just keep working - the issue being that trying to get to real addresses in the 1.0.0.0/8 network (or parts of it) wouldn't work.

If you were BGP peering then you'd probably get a real route into your local table though.

So yeah, some stuff would probably have just broken, but that's the risk you take using parts of the IP space you shouldn't be using!

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