Re: [Int-area] Introducing IPv4 Unicast Extensions with new draft-schoen-intarea-lowest-address

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

What's the problem you're trying to solve here, John, that's not already
solved by just using IPv6? I'm not saying there isn't one, but if there is,
I'm not seeing it.

The ability to free up IPv4 addresses to monetize doesn't seem like it
would pay back the people who would be doing the work to free them up, so
it's hard to see where the incentive would be for this work to be deployed.
Even if there were some small benefit per individual person, it probably
wouldn't be enough to justify the trouble of individually making this
change. Sure, if a single entity could reap the rewards of this work, that
might be worth it to that entity, but that entity couldn't be the one that
would pay the cost of making this change.


On Tue, Aug 03, 2021 at 4:43 AM, John Gilmore <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Do I understand correctly, that you are proposing that all hosts, routers,
> firewalls, middle boxes, etc. on the Internet, be updated in order to get a
> single extra IP address per subnet? ... To me this fails the cost benefit
> analysis.
>
> You may be right (see below). One confounding factor is that the
> lowest-address draft is the first of a set of upcoming drafts that propose
> small, easy improvements in IPv4. This set of changes, in aggregate, will
> be worth implementing, because they create hundreds of millions of newly
> usable addresses, worth billions of dollars at current prices. If the
> cost-vs-benefit is worth doing for ANY ONE of these changes, or for any
> subset of these changes, then the deployment effort may as well include the
> other, smaller, improvements, which will come for very close to free.
>
> I agree that the "lowest address" protocol change is only likely to
> produce tens of millions of newly usable addresses, creating only perhaps
> $250M to $500M of benefits at current prices. That alone might not be worth
> doing, particularly since predicting FUTURE prices of IPv4 addresses is
> risky. But let's look at the costs. The end-user cost of updating can be
> zero because it can be deferred until equipment is naturally upgraded for
> other reasons. Nobody would buy a new router to get this feature, but
> eventually almost everybody buys a new router. Or installs the latest OS
> release. The change is completely compatible with existing networks, since
> the lowest addresses are currently not known to be used for anything and
> have been declared obsolete in IETF standards for decades. This makes the
> deployment risk very low.
>
> So I expect the main cost would be for each vendor to make and test small
> patches to their existing IPv4 implementations, and then include those
> changes as part of their next release or product. Our team successfully
> patched both Linux and BSD over a few weeks, and interoperated them
> successfully. Based on that experience, I estimate implementation costs to
> major IPv4 vendors to be under $10M in total. By 5 to 10 years after
> adoption, the improvement would be everywhere, and will probably have paid
> off about 25-to-1. I agree that the people incurring the costs of this
> proposal are not the people who end up getting the benefit of the IP
> addresses; the benefit goes to the vendors' customers, benefiting the
> vendors indirectly. So the cost-benefit tradeoff might be more societal (or
> network-wide) than individual or corporate. My understanding is that IETF's
> role is as a steward of network-wide value, which is why I thought this
> might interest IETF.
>
> John Gilmore
> IPv4 Unicast Extensions
>
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