[AFRINIC-rpd] Academic IPv4 Allocation Policy Second Draft (AFPUB-2013-GEN-001-DRAFT-02)

[Owen DeLong]

On Jan 26, 2013, at 01:07 , SM <sm at resistor.net> wrote:

> Hi Badru,
> At 20:18 25-01-2013, Badru Ntege wrote:
>> The statistics are showing the demand for the urban institutions with the financial resources to build a network that can support this demand and thus the need to have an idea of the network.  But out in the real world not all academic institutions have the resources to build such networks.
>> 
>> which is why it is a good idea to have an understanding of the network size.  if we go by institutional population we might be introducing a major flaw.
> 
> I'll try and restate what you said in the first paragraph.  University A and B each have 10,000 persons.   University A has the resources to build a network to service these 10,000 persons.  University B does not have the resources to build a network to service these 10,000 persons.  If I use population count as a measure I would be giving 50,000 IP addresses to University A and 50,000 IP addresses University B.
> 
> University B is using 5,000 IP addresses only and 45,000 IP addresses are not utilized.  The amount of free IP addresses for the region reaches a level where I cannot provide IP addresses to University C which has a population of 5,000 persons.  Somebody points out that there are 45,000 IP addresses not being utilized at University B.  I cannot do anything about it.
> 

This situation is fictitious. There is no meaningful limit on the number of available IP addresses. With more than 3.4E38 IP addresses available, I do not see how you would ever run into such a problem.

Now, if you are talking strictly about the limited legacy IPv4 addresses, then...

> The questions are:
> 
> (a) Should I fix the non-utilization problem?
> 

No. Instead, University C should deploy IPv6 as that is the only true solution to the IPv4 scarcity problem anyway.

> (b) Is it possible for me to fix the non-utilization problem?

Not really, and, even if you do, you will still eventually have a university D that cannot get addresses. You cannot prevent the shortage of IPv4 addresses. You can create greater inconvenience and denser packing of utilization for existing organizations in the hope of being able to under-allocate to future organizations rather than simply unable to allocate to them at all, but, runout is inevitable and all we can do with restrictive allocation policies is:

	1.	Procrastinate actual runout.
	2.	Make the current network more dysfunctional than necessary.

Owen