Leo Vegoda wrote:
On 29 Oct 2007, at 14:47, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
[...]
The best solution is NO market and reclaiming address space that is unused.
How much of the currently allocated IPv4 address space do you believe is unused? How much do you think a reclaim programme would cost to run? And we've tried appealing to people's better natures to return unused space. The result confirmed what most of us thought already: people mostly don't have better natures. So the next phase is to encourage them to return addresses into the pool (and remember, it doesn't matter whether they return via the RIRs or not, as long as they become usable) by allowing them to sell, buy or barter. IPv4 space has a limited life anyway. Once we hit 51% of traffic being IPv6 there will be a rapid flip-flop and IPv4 will be dead. A market in V4 addresses will at least allow network designers to put a real cost on not switching to IPv6 and may actually result in business cases being built. This will speed the adoption of IPv6. This is one of the aims of our proposal
Leo has already proved that a (fairly simple) reclamation job takes a lot of time and resource. This is for a /8 that no one much wanted and no one much used. Nigel