Hi *,

initially reading, nowadays just browsing over the posts about 2015-05, I don't get it ...

Yes, I understand the pain new LIRs have with the limited availability of v4 addresses. We have a small local provider, a small city that has gone through the trouble of installing a FO infrastructure to provide high-speed internet to most of its citizens, and has to do with their /22 assignment (they became an LIR to get those) for something around (currently) 3k customers, of those something like 100+ businesses. They run native v6 dual-stacked with CGN v4, which - especially for the business customers - isn't the optimal solution (just using a /29 for each business would more or less deplete their public v4 range). So yes, they would love to get more v4, but they can't.

I keep reading phrases like "it's not fair", "it's anti-competitive". Hell yes it is. But business has never been fair. If you're coming late to a supper, you may not get all the best pieces of the food that was available at the beginning. If you're late to the business, many customers will already have found a different provider for their requirements and will often not even talk to you. So what, you have to live with it. You knew you were a late entry, if you didn't know what you were getting into, if you are surprised by the limitations of both the market itself and RIPE specifically, you obviously didn't do your homework! Heck, even if you already have a /20, /19 or whatever and are running out of v4 addresses - why are you surprised? v4 was running out a long time ago, which was only delayed by NAT "technology", a kluge to allow for a better technology (IPv6) to be finished and rolled out - 15 years later and too many providers still do not see the necessity of rolling out v6.

Who is to blame? Well, of course those providers, most likely ones that still have sufficient amounts of free v4 addresses. To a minor degree possibly their customers, as they ought to be requesting dual-stacked internet from their ISPs. But why should they? Everything is working, and setting up v6 doesn't (in most cases) earn them any benefits.

So what could be done? Technically, not much I guess. Sure, we could level the playing field, the RIRs could pass a policy retracting half of all assigned v4 addresses annually from anybody holding - say - /20 or larger. Even going down to 50% would most likely require many LIRs to actually roll out v6, apart from annoy a whole lot of people, as the ISPs would be forced to renumber the remaining IP assignments to their customers.

Would such a policy change be enforceable? I doubt it, or at the very least many of the larger ISPs will fight it with all they have (read: law suits).

So, as it is, we have a situation in which many large ISPs give a f*ck about the IPv4 scarcity, stick with their pool of v4 addresses and wait until actual customers request v6, which won't happen, so there is no business case to implement it for quite some time. Many other ISPs have to make do, and are at a weaker business position than should be necessary, but there's nothing we as a RIPE community can do except keep up the current policy to at least allow for SOME possibility of getting on the net for new entries, and keep pushing v6 in the market, in a hope to make customers aware of the necessity of v6 to THEIR business! Maybe then more ISPs will finally invest in the future of their part of the Internet.