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

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

> My understanding is that IETF's role is as a
> steward of network-wide value, which is why I thought this might
> interest IETF.

Not quite. The mission is "to make the Internet work better" and
affecting the sales value of 32 bit numbers is not really the same
thing, especially since 128 bit numbers are already much cheaper. 

Regards
   Brian Carpenter

On 03-Aug-21 21:43, John Gilmore 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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