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What's holding back the prophesied low-end price hike due to IPv4 exhaustion?
sundaymouse
Member
I remember a few years ago when the last ARIN and RIPE blocks were assigned, there were wide speculation here and elsewhere that the lowest of the low-end prices may become untenable within years. To date that doesn't seem to have happened, with $15-20 a year VPS with dedicated IPv4 on sale everywhere, and only a handful of providers are offering NAT servers as a mainstream product.
What's holding the inevitable back? Were the IP hoarder hosting companies really really good at collecting the last stash? Is the rising price of IP leases subsidising the cheap customers keeping the stock IPs in good, justifiable use?
Thanked by 1raindog308
Comments
The last blocks being assigned was often exaggerated from reality. It was commonly referenced to stir a sense of panic to make you think "this is the end, there's no more, it's done." Yet, look at the ARIN waiting list:
https://www.arin.net/resources/guide/ipv4/waiting_list/
You'll notice that a /24 gets fulfilled pretty quickly. I'm on the list for a /22 right now so that'll take longer, but a /24 is like ~2 months.
People are still getting IPv4, and the "black market" for IPv4 isn't doing poorly either.
Seeing how active and large "IP rental" market is, IPv4 is unlike to go away in our lifetime.
The problem with ipv4 for a long time was wasted IPs.
I mean have you ever hear the phrase "IPV6 is awesome".
More industry consolidation. More client consolidation per machine. Equals more IPs available. I'm sure some of the feable attempts at cracking down on spammers also increases market liquidity for IPs.
Because I was right when I said years ago that ipv4 exhaustion was overhyped.
There's still tons of privately-owned blocks that can be internally renumbered and sold. As prices rise, it becomes attractive to those orgs and companies to do the work to renumber and sell, and then supply increases, so prices fall. Then when demand increases over supply, the cycle repeats.
This process can't go on forever but I think we're still a long ways away from "exhaustion".
Also, ipv6 is in wider use now, which drives down ipv4 demand.
I'm developing the new internet that does not use addresses. The network can send packets using their names. It can support infinite number of devices just like you can have infinite number of domain names.
Wait...I thought we are getting ipv4+?
FYI congress in the us was supposed to force the DOD to sell 210 million IPv4 if I am not wrong.
We are far form out of IPv4's. MIT Just sold a big chunk of their /8. The pricing of IPv4 going up is only encouraging companies to use it properly. I'd give it 10+ years of life.
(ads)
we even talk about it here: https://hosterlabs.net/ip-exhaustion-the-end-of-the-world/
The only way for IP v4 to die is when the space age comes.
That will be the point where IP v4 isn't just enough. Doubt IP v6 will replace it though. Something more fancy will come.
And NAT's in Nat's are becoming more and more popular. My ISP gives me an IP with a NAT, which is then on a nat on my router level that delivers an ip to each machine I have. So if I had 30 devices, because IoT, and there were let's say 255 households connected to one IP, you are connecting 250*30 devices with a single IP. That is crazy efficient.
Same goes for mobile networks, a cell tower might have only one IP but serves thousands of people.
My GF have public IPv4 in her phone. I know not too many people have on their phone but exists.
Yeah, not many have real world GF nowadays. It's gone all virtual.
Can we just slap a few extra zeros and call it a day?
Like,
192.168.60.13.37.1
Marginally better than v6 I guess.
I agree
lol. Isn't IPv6 doing basically that, adding more bits(zeros). under the hood its just binary.
If you really(really) want you can use decimal notation for v6 as well.
Care to demonstrate? Because so far v6 looks like a MAC address and is certainly not appealing to me one bit. I’d rather stick with NAT IPv4 than try to work with IPv6
Well it is easy, ipv4 has 32 bits and ipv6 has 128 bits. The main difference I guess is that ipv6 is hexadecimal, so it translates binary to hexadecimal, where ipv4 translates binary to the decimal system ish.
Check it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_address#/media/File:Ipv6_address_leading_zeros.svg
You see ipv6 as strange and difficult because we are not used to handling an hexadecimal system. Where have yo seen that ever?
At the end of the day it is 96 zeros and ones extra. I guess the main difference is how this zeros are translated.
If you wanted to extend IPv6 with numbers instead of hexadecimals, the highest number would be 2^16 in the each section. So in decimal it would look like this:
65536.65536.65536.65536.65536.65536.65536.65536
But I guess the creators of IPv6 chose the hexadecimal instead of decimal for convenience. As you can shorten IPv6's easily, they are more "user friendly" and faster to compute.
Maybe I am wrong, feel free to correct me.
Well, ipv6 looks ugly, its ugly to use etc.
Hell, I can ssh into my servers without even opening some file to remember the IP's. Try doing that with v6.
::ffff:192.0.8.1
It can look like a mac address sometimes because it uses it. (EUI-64)
Even though v6 has 128 bits, it reality good ISPs provide the first 64bits, which the other half you can configure your self.
So it can have address like below.
2001:db8:203:188d::
2001:db8:480:1aa1::1
2001:db8:480:1aa1::b
2001:db8:480:1aa1::1000
when trying v6, do not compare it with v4 at all. Think of your addressing scheme in a new way and you like it a whole lot better.
I already do that with v6
Like saved putty sessions or similar or actually just typing in v6 addresses from your memory?
who remembers IPs?
typing v6 addresses from memory. i remember them just like v4; it's really only 7-8 characters to remember, shorter than a full v4 addr. but i don't randomly generate full xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:..etc.
if i am doing anything like that (full automation), it will be doing dns resolution automatically, like in kubernetes, so i can just access a service like "webapp.namespace.svc.local" from anything else in the cluster.
@hzr Gotta say thats impressive. I cant seem to remember v6-s at all even tho v4-s are no issue to remember.
Yeah, but that being said - I think you would have a easier time with something like
2001:db8::8:eor similar rather than2001:0db8:18d7:poop:69:420:1:yesor249.120.4.188(or maybe it's easier for you because you are possibly used to numeric phone number memorisation? my generation did not grow up needing to know or remember phone numbers -- I'm actually curious if this might partially explain why because it feels a lot easier to remember, say, battlenetusername#2001 rather than a set of 7-14 numbers.)I have very few v4 that I've remembered, since working in Enterprise Cloud means all I see is RFC1918 space and load balancers everywhere
That‘s what DNS is designed for anyways. Also, IPv6 can be short too, as you can skip 0s. For example, that‘s the IPv6 of our Looking Glass: 2a0d:f300::4
If your provider assigns you a /64 you can always skip half of the address and just go with ::1 as suffix.
You actually might be on to something here about the phone numbers etc.
I've always had to remember phone nr-s in 6-7 digit and my actual social security code which is 11 digits. (I even know my wifes and mothers if that makes any sense lol)
Or just the fact that I already hated it enough when they mixed letters into numbers in math at school lol
Long story short for some unknown reason v6 just doesnt make any sense to me compared to v4
@alwyzon
"For example, that‘s the IPv6 of our Looking Glass: 2a0d:f300::4"
I mean..if youd have to actually tell someone that (not write) which would make more sense? That thing or just saying "uh yeah its 144.76.xx.x"
Maybe im just overthinking this.
Yes. But they forgot to stop adding Zeroes and went like crazy. Let's dial it down a notch and keep it simple for a while.
Something like what I call IPv5. 64 bits so about 4 billion times todays IPv4 address space plus much less demanding on routers, switches, etc. than IPv6.
@all
No surprise that there still is plenty IP4. After all this is a deal driven world and when something gets scarce its price rises which again make some players sell. Plus IMO IPv6 helps a lot because those who take that train free up valuable IP4s.
Plus there still are some untapped and very rich reserves. To name one example: to introduce a new 'A+' DNS record which would be a normal A record plus a port number attached to finally allow us to stop the wasteful idiocy of fixed ports (e.g. http = 80).
My guess is that IPv6 will continue to crouch and to not get much love and that some day the internet org morons see the light and introduce something like IPv5 that is, an extended version of IP4 that also largely looks and feels like IP4 and hence finds rapid uptake.
Side note: there should be a world wide rule that nobody except providers gets more than IP4 /24. If whole countries can live with NAT then so can american colleges or german corporations.
VirMach will prefer to do this instead of IPv6.