
The UK has an entire IPv4 /8 that it isn't using - jgrahamc
http://blog.jgc.org/2012/09/the-uk-has-entire-unused-ipv4-8-that-is.html
======
tptacek
There are lots of stories like this. Many of them are worse; at least you can
imagine that the UK is holding these addresses in reserve. There are companies
with giant allocations that are holding them so that they can give every
desktop and every printer in their enterprise a routable address; others are
doing the same thing, but also operating _flat, unrouted networks_.

More evidence for the core problem: fiat allocation doesn't work. If there was
a functioning, liquid, accessible market for advertisable IP prefixes, you
wouldn't have to convince anyone that a /8 was worth $1bn; it just would be.

~~~
bo1024
...and, anyone who didn't have $1bn to spend would be SOL.

There's plenty of numbers to go around; the sooner we get to v6 and get around
this mess, the better.

~~~
pash
What an embarrassing failure of economic reasoning.

IPv4 addresses are a scare resource. Acknowledging that, and allowing them to
be traded at a price that reflects their value, is the surest way to get them
out of the hands of those who are wasting them in the way tptacek and the
article describe and into the hands of those who will do something more
productive with them. Pricing IPv4 addresses would hasten adoption of IPv6 by
providing a financial incentive to switch from IPv4 to IPv6 to those who can
do so most easily (i.e., cheaply).

In other words, if you want to "get around this mess", stop allocating scarce
and valuable IPv4 addresses as if they have no value.

~~~
eli
But (and someone correct me if I'm wrong), but individual IP addresses are not
a commodity. If you broke apart that /8 and auctioned them off, if would be a
routing nightmare.

~~~
rdl
Are there any /8 which can't be broken down to at least /16? I think you can
often get down to /19 or sometimes /22.

~~~
dfox
Smallest prefix that can be meaningfully used is /24 (you cannot advertise
smaller prefix), but I think that everyone advertising random /24s would lead
to even larger costs for router upgrades than IPv6.

~~~
rdl
I think there are still bigger than /24s where /24 announcements aren't
allowed. People filtered for a while (at least around 2000-2002) in those
ranges, so you couldn't just take a random swamp /16 and turn it into a bunch
of /24s and expect them to be visible to everyone, although it did work to
most. I haven't paid much attention to routing politics for the past 5 years
or so though.

------
forgotusername
I'm not sure about the definition of 'unused', just because a network is not
visible from the Internet and has no publicly registered ASNs doesn't mean its
numbers are not in private use (which AFAIK, was always a legitimate use-case
for getting an allocation, and in many ways preferable to reusing RFC1918
space).

Added to that, even if it was seeing only minuscule internal use, the UK
government's IT project reputation suggests the renumbering would cost at
least as much as the block would sell for, assuming the project would even
complete prior to the entire planet properly migrating to v6 and the block
losing its value.

~~~
s_henry_paulson
If there are no networks defined, as far as RIPE is concerned, it's un-used.

We just got audited for RIPE for exactly this reason, and they made us specify
details for all of the networks we use on our allocation to be allowed to keep
our address space.

~~~
X-Istence
That's not the case for older legacy networks. Those don't fall under the
purview of RIPE as they were allocated before RIPE existed.

I'm wondering if RIPE can even do anything regarding that netblock in terms of
possibly pulling it and re-allocating it.

~~~
kiallmacinnes
As far as I know, they can't.

All they can do (and have already done) is ask nicely for it back.

~~~
wpietri
Well, if they were feeling ballsy, they could just declare it unused, break it
up, and start assigning it. A lot more network nerds would listen to RIPE than
to some random UK pension bureaucracy.

------
ChuckMcM
No doubt part of the strategic IP reserve :-)

There are a number of ways the IP addresses can not appear to the outside user
and still be used as several have mentioned, and of course they can be for
some project that isn't yet 'done' (the Coast Guard had a huge block like that
as I recall) but the more interesting bit is to track the cost of getting an
/24 network its inching up. At the time where the easy stuff has been
reclaimed it will shoot up.

------
cbs
We need to quit looking back at the v4 space like this, bite the bullet and
deploy v6. It's already in use on some networks, and inevitable on 95+% of the
rest.

The amount of time spent bike-shedding "well, v4 isn't running out as fast as
they say it is" or "NAT will save us" (lol, no) that time is better spent
deploying v6. For many installations, its actually not that big of a deal to
do.

~~~
sjwright
And we will move, but it's not going to happen until 98% of the world's
networking infrastructure (both public and private) is IP6 ready, which
probably won't be for another decade.

~~~
cbs
That's the thing though. If everyone is waiting on everyone else, nothing gets
done.

If your network doesn't already support v6, you're the person everyone is
waiting on! You don't need to wait for your upstream provider to supply you
with v6, tunnels are super easy to get.

The only exception to tunneling is if you're hosting a public-facing service,
don't have v6 connectivity and don't trust existing tunnel providers. In this
case: First, why are you at you're current host or colo center? They're
probably shit. Second, set up a box at a provider with good connectivity to
run the tunnel yourself. This is basically what we already do when we want to
use our public v4 space but the ISP doesn't want to let us talk BGP.

~~~
Diamons
This is a hackers perspective and doesn't apply to the normal consumer.

~~~
cbs
Thats kind of my point. If you're the type of person to actually know what v6
is, you're the type of person we're all waiting on.

edit: And its not a "hackers" thing, its a "technical competency" thing.

~~~
jwatte
It's also a "business competency" thing. Which, sadly, does not overlap very
much with "technical competency" in many organizations.

------
lmm
Hooray, another /8, that'll last us for a good month or so. Exponential growth
people, reclaiming unused IP blocks isn't going to stop it.

And that's ignoring the possibilities that a) it's being used internally by
its legitimate owners b) it's being used internally by other people. T-Mobile
were seen to be (mis)using the /8 that belongs to the UK MOD for their
internal networks, I wouldn't be surprised if they were doing that with this
as well.

There aren't that many IPv4 addresses. There are no easy fixes. Just move to
IPv6 already.

~~~
tomjen3
Do you have an idea of how many IPv4 addresses that are unused or not really
needed?

Between the bunch MIT got, the bunch that the military got and the bunch that
IBM got, we can implement an entirely new protocol before we run out.

~~~
mayneack
At MIT a 30 person living group gets 18.n.x.x

~~~
clarkm
Posting from our own 18.n.0.0/16 Class B subnet right now. There's a few
thousand available IPs for each person who lives here.

~~~
sprobertson
Which will be great for testing my Raspberry Pi distributed web server. But
useless for anyone who doesn't know / care what an IP address is (70% of us?)

~~~
mayneack
I would imagine that you'd have more of a problem finding enough ethernet
ports than ip addresses.

------
CrLf
No traces of this block in the public Internet doesn't mean it isn't being
used. It may be in use in some internal network(s) instead of a private
address range (yes, that happens).

~~~
sjwright
Running NAT behind a routable IP address range AND using a totally different
range for all servers, VPNs, and various sysadmin crap? I don't believe it.

There's no way they would be so diligent to use that IP range internally
without even a tiny bit of evidence externally.

~~~
omh
This is the government, so it's practically guaranteed that there's at least
two layers of firewalls between any internal networks and the internet. If any
of those layers was installed by an average IT consultancy then they'll have
used NAT (because that's what you always do, right?) and hidden 51./8
completely.

------
jrockway
Who cares? IPv4 is a dead technology and this is like complaining that the UK
has a bunch of fax machines in storage somewhere. 10 years ago, this would
have been a waste. Now it doesn't even matter.

Even Comcast supports IPv6.

~~~
wglb
So how do you envision the transition taking place? Given that 6 and 4 talk
past each other.

~~~
jrockway
The transition has sort of already happened. Most software stacks support IPv6
now, and many server hosting companies are giving out IPv6 addresses like
candy. (I think I have a /48 or something for jrock.us. That's 2 to the 48th
IPv4 Internets! I have a lot of computers, but not that many.)

All that's left are the clients, and the way I see that transition happening
is in the low-cost sector. Sort of like an AOL where you won't have IPv4, so
you'll have to access everything through a proxy except IPv6 sites. Eventually
businesses will want to cater to this demographic and the stragglers will flip
the IPv6 switch. With nobody on IPv4, it won't be a premium value-add anymore,
and that era will be a distant memory of the past like BBSes are now.

Right now the IPv4 situation is not bad enough to make widespread IPv6 support
critical to one's economic viability yet. Being able to see the animated
turtle on kame.net isn't quite enough of an incentive, but the incentives will
slowly shift.

(I see the same transition away from fossil fuels. Right now, an investment in
alternative energies is pure speculation: it may pay off someday, but we don't
know when that day is. When we've run out, though, the payoff will be clear:
you will get infinite money the second you figure out some way to give
humanity energy. This will encourage more investment than some nebulous LEED
certification will. Tax credits are nice, but not as nice as cash.)

~~~
geofft
"The transition has sort of already happened," he says, over IPv4.

Seriously, unless you want to be posting to HN via IPv4 in 2050, there is
clearly something major left undone. Don't call it a transition if you think
that concept is undone, but it's not yet functionally possible to be on the
Internet with no IPv4 stack or (possibly NATted) address, and I don't see that
becoming the case anytime soon.

See <http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html> for a description of the problem
that I mostly agree with. The depressing thing is that those complaints are no
less valid a decade later.

~~~
jrockway
Only because HN is IPv4-only. I'm sitting in a remote office on my laptop this
morning, and it has an IPv6 address. When I visit google.com, it's over IPv6.

It's happening.

~~~
geofft
Why is HN IPv4-only? And why should they bother to spend any effort fixing it?
Given that, e.g., techcrunch.com and github.com and everything else linked
from HN is IPv4-only, you can't usefully use Hacker News from an IPv6-only
connection, so why should HN care?

You're expecting altruism or geekiness on the part of every single website
ever -- it's fair to expect that from Google, but not from everyone. The
transition may or may not be happen_ing_, but it will never finish.

~~~
jrockway
No I'm not, I'm expecting anti-altruism from low-cost ISPs. (Name one consumer
ISP that you think is altruistic.) Then, to capture that market, servers will
start deploying IPv6.

Today, IPv6 is billed as a premium feature. Tomorrow, IPv4 will be the premium
feature.

~~~
geofft
Wait, you expect any low-cost ISPs to offer IPv6-only, and have any customers
at all? And that IPv4-only sites will say "gee, better support those IPv6-only
users" instead of saying "get a better ISP" (or more likely "We have no idea
what's wrong, but it works from Comcast, complain to your ISP")?

I don't think you understand how the Internet works. Or business. There is no
foreseeable point at which it makes sense to bill an "Internet" service that's
IPv6-only. That's doable _after_ the transition, but expecting that to happen
now is not a transition.

------
lucb1e
I find this funny. The IANA holds 15 IPv4 /8 blocks, even mentions "Reserved
for future use" when whoissing, and nobody cares.

~~~
wmf
Not really. All the blocks that are marked "reserved" are more like
"unusable"; e.g. real equipment cannot use class E. People have been over this
stuff with a fine-toothed comb. [http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-
space/ipv4-addr...](http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-
space/ipv4-address-space.xml)

~~~
lucb1e
I know, but I still think it's stupid. Nevermind though, it's an endless
opinionated discussion.

------
lolryan
Amateur radio also has an unused IPv4 /8 block as well. That $500 mil could go
quite a ways towards building a few amsats.

~~~
X-Istence
Hey, some of us HAMS are still using AMPRNet ... not many, but some.

That being said, here is a list of people in charge of allocations:
<http://www.ampr.org/oldsite/amprnets.txt>

~~~
TheGateKeeper
I'm currently enjoying its usage as well. Whoever said it was unused doesn't
know what they're talking about.

------
Zenst
How many mobile phones made per day that support some form of internet access
and how many of those use IPV6?

Scary thought is it not!

The first real opertunity to move to IPV6 in any way would be mobile
smartphones and there like and yet that is not happening. It realy is a case
of the ISP's and mobile telco's that need to start initiating the IPV6 move
and until they do nobody will be dragged into following.

Maybe if it was illegal to sell devices that don't at least support IPV6. But
of a messy situation when you can buy devices made brand new that still dont
offer IPV6 support, criminal realy.

Still when you look into the history of British railways and the better modern
alternatives you can see how some legacy designs just carry on with there
limitations of capacity oversight.

Another aspect is cunsumers have in many respects forgotten how to complain to
a company and let there frustrations out on the internet in area's were the
companys offering the services will completely fail to notice and allow you to
complain and vent of without them even knowing or indeed having to care.

How many of you have asked there internet service provider if they support
IPV6 or indeed what there plans are to offer it? Reason I ask is that I can
bet it's lower than 1 in 100 or indeed 1 in 100,000. I can't even recall any
one of my friends or anybody I know or have dealing with ever mentioning they
had made such an enquiry. I know I have, please tell me I'm not alone at
least.

~~~
wmf
Verizon and T-Mobile are running quite a bit of IPv6 but nobody noticed since
it just works.

------
fpp
When looking into unused IPv4 /8 blocks besides private companies, could
somebody please explain how much of the 201,326,592 addresses (12x /8)
allocated to the US DoD have ever been used

~~~
wmf
They'll never tell you and it doesn't matter since they'll never give those
addresses up.

------
rightyeah
How much does it cost to "produce" an /8? Nothing. In the "magical" world of
the internet, you don't even need to build a network to use the addresses on.
Nor do you need to prove that you actually have any sort of "rights" (as the
legal kind) over the addresses. Because there is no one who can grant you such
rights. Hate to spoil the magick trick, but no one owns the internet. The
whole scheme works on cooperation of network admins and acquiescence of
everyone else.

And the top post claims it would be worth $1BB. Keep dreaming.

The truth is that the value is not in addresses, the value is in the network,
and those who own the infrastructure, but of course there is no single
infrastructure for the internet because it's a network of networks, owned by
various parties.

The telephone company can charge you for a telephone number. It owns the
network that you're going to use it on. If it didn't own the network, you
would not pay for the number. You are paying to use the network. The number is
just a formality.

This same is not true for the internet and IP numbers. The RIR's don't own any
networks. There isn't even a clear line to the source of their authority to
"allocate" address space. Does the US Government own the internet? Good luck
with that argument. RIR's charge fees to "allocate" addresses, an
administrative job, but we have no idea how the fees are spent. Maybe to pay
the CEO's generous salary? How much work is it to keep track of some numbers?
Maybe we should ask IANA. The whole scheme works based on cooperation and
acquiescence.

No organisation ever paid $1BB for an /8. They got theirs for "free"
(inconsequential maintenance fees notwithstanding).

------
eddanger
51.0.0.0/8 the secret IP block otherwise known as Block 51.

------
FuzzyDunlop
The argument is that if our government disposed of this 'asset' now, they'd
rake in almost £1bn.

IPv6 is still not mainstream, so this figure can reasonably increase over time
with the increase in IPv4 scarcity.

Thus it stands to reason not to sell out just yet.

------
7952
Can IP blocks actually be sold?

~~~
drucken
Yes. Privately and normally as part of bankruptcy proceedings. The most famous
recent example is probably Microsoft's purchase of Nortel's addresses,
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12859585>

------
webwanderings
Eventually in the future, people will come to realize the over-exaggeration of
running out of ipv4 addresses. The unused blocks will come out of woodwork
from everywhere. Well, I hope my opinion is wrong.

~~~
SG-
By future do you mean right now where NAT is being used by some providers
already? I know Rogers in Canada has all mobile devices going through NAT
unless you pay a nice "VPN" fee.

Also the assigned but unused IPv4 blocks don't do anything for other providers
that actually need addresses.

~~~
indiecore
and that's extremely profitable for them. Why would they switch to a format
that doesn't give them the easy out to gouge customers?

~~~
SG-
Profitable? I guess, but it doesn't make them much or any revenue since i'm
pretty sure 99% of their mobile customers don't really care.

------
nerd_in_rage
I have my own /24 routed to my basement. Back in the early/mid 90's could get
their own provider independent block.

If I knew now what I knew then, I would've gone for a class B block. lol.

------
jwatte
This is why organizations should pay $1 per year for each IP address they own.

------
infinitivium
what if IP addresses were allocated / confirmed by a bitcoin-like network?

~~~
TheGateKeeper
You mean completely unstable and essentially useless? No thanks.

