IPv4 space resale: And so it begins

It was bound to happen. The IPv4 address pool has nearly run out, IPv6 adoption is moving at a glacial pace, but demand for devices to be IP-enabled is soaring. And so, the vultures have come:

Dear Mr. Wagner,

We would like to invite your company to become a REDACTED Marketplace participant, where you can purchase the rights to unused IPv4 number blocks. There is no cost to become a participant and we currently have significant listings of various size number blocks which can be easily transferred to your company under existing policy.

We are available to discuss how the marketplace works or can provide it to you in writing if you prefer. Please contact me if this interests your company.

Best regards,

XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX
Outreach Coordinator, European Market
REDACTED Marketplace Services

I suppose I’m being unfair. The market is simply moving to fill the demand. But this is monetisation of a resource which should be free, infinite, and available to all. And thanks to politics and bad governance, we’ll soon have to pay for even the smallest IPv4 subnet. That will be a bar to entry to individuals and smaller companies, who will find themselves on a second-tier Internet. The one with private IP space, NAT, and the limitations that come with them.

  1. Kareem Ali’s avatar

    Hi,

    We get many of those emails now because we’re registered as an LIR with RIPE, all dumped of course.

    Is Talia running IPv6 on it’s services now ?

    Also, have you tried setting up an IPv6 tunnel over OpenVPN? It’s cool.

    Kareem.

    Reply

    1. Tyler Wagner’s avatar

      We have an IPv6 allocation but most satellite providers do not yet have IPv6 support in their products. Which sucks, but I’ve seen some evidence that iDirect will support it in a few years’ time.

      No, I haven’t done any 6-in-4 tunnelling, on OpenVPN or otherwise. I’ve done a lot of OpenVPN benchmarking lately and come to the conclusion that its performance is just too poor to use between routers. On workstations with 2.2+ GHz processors, fine. On low-power devices, even with crypto processors, forget it. It’s quite disappointing, but that’s what you get with userspace (not kernelspace) networking.

      Reply

    2. Kareem Ali’s avatar

      > I’ve done a lot of OpenVPN benchmarking lately and come to the conclusion that its performance is just too poor to use between routers.

      You’re right, it is disappointing. I’ll keep it in mind if we do any upgrades to avoid doing that.

      For the time being Vyatta is doing everything for us but it’s full of bugs. Bugs that relates to extra functions and hidden features that you would want to implement to control specifics over BGP and IPv6, not the general stuff which works fine out of the box.

      Reply

      1. Tyler Wagner’s avatar

        It’s embarrassing, but for a router implemented for ordinary users, I recommend Mikrotik now. It’s annoying that they chose to reimplement the wheel – every wheel – but for the functions it’s designed for, it works very well.

        For my own routers, where I can play with them, I like to work with my own implementations on Ubuntu. That’s what I originally developed for Talia, after all. But even at Talia we’re moving to Mikrotik because that’s easier for the typical new hire to deal with.

        Reply

        1. Kareem Ali’s avatar

          Thanks for that. I’ve tried MikroTik only on a VM and didn’t play with it much but I guess I’ll keep it as a strong candidate now that you’ve recommended it.

          I wish there will be a time where I can dive into your implementations and see what’s under the hood :D.

          Also, I’m looking at EdgeRouter stuff for home use and for our office. It’s based on Vyatta and it’s developed by three former Vyatta developers, whom originally developed most of Vyatta it self. They’ve added some cool features to it to. The big bump about it though is that it only runs on their hardware.

          Reply

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