Dear all,

Since my last posting to SIG Policy on 22/08/2011 I have received number of comments from participants. Through this reply I am giving my response to these comments. I would like to reiterate that the theme of prop-100 is to ask the APNIC community to make a policy for reservation of contiguous IP address blocks of certain minimum size for all countries in the APNIC region whether they are demanding or not so that they can meet out the requirements of their organizations out of these reserved blocks in future.  

1.       IPv4 distribution in 1996 versus today if proposal was accepted in 1996 (comments by Mark Newton, John Mann,  Tom Vest etc.)

 

(a)    If a policy like prop-100 would have been implemented in 1996, the IPv4 distribution today would have been very different. The status of IPv6 today in terms of less demand and large availability is similar to the situation of IPv4 in the early nineties. Due to inadequate planning of IPv4, large blocks of IPv4 were indiscriminately given to different organizations in only a few countries, thereby creating shortage of addresses very soon.  When this fact dawned upon the custodians of IPv4 addresses, needs based policies were evolved to restrict the allocation of addresses. The prices of IPv4 addresses went up and became costly for organizations which came later. The net result is that today late entrant organizations are paying a high cost for IPv4 addresses and in reality subsidizing those  organizations who are holding more addresses.  

(b)   Regarding the comment that such a policy in 1996 would lead to more wastage of addresses upto 50% is hypothetical. Is there any study which leads to such conclusions? Even if we assume that there would have been more wastage, the beauty of a prop-100 like policy is that it would have led to the following –

a.        All the countries would have got some address space reserved for their organizations for future use

b.      Technologies like NAT was primarily developed to compensate the IPv4 address shortage  which distorted the original architecture of the Internet

c.       IPv6 would also have come much earlier.

d.      There would be less of subsidization of organization in countries holding large blocks of addresses.

(c)    Regarding the comments that hoarding of addresses by economies would lead to dampening of the internet / smart phone revolution is again hypothetical and perhaps unsustainable.  E.g. a smart phone revolution is happening in India in spite of shortage of addresses. So there appears no correlation between the two.

 

 

2.       When 2 years ago, there were 300 million addresses, why Indian ISPs did not apply ? What is broken in the current APNIC policy ? (Comment by John Mann)

 

(a)    First I would like to state that our proposal is for all countries in the APNIC region and not just for India alone.

(b)   As far as allocation of IPv4 addresses to Indian ISPs is concerned, the commenter has tried to guess some reasons but those are just assumptions as no such study has been done by anyone on this subject as we understand. 

(c)    Two years ago India was having just 18.5 million addresses and now it has 34.5 million addresses for more than 350 million data users out of more than 850 million mobile users. There is almost 90% growth in allocation.  This may be happening with other economies also. But it seems current APNIC policies are not taking adequate care to forecast needs of different economies to make provision for adequate address blocks for them. Therefore, I would like to summarize below what I feel is broken in current APNIC policy

-          If countries / organizations are not aware of their requirements then it means there is lack of awareness and APNIC needs to do something about it. Perhaps all stakeholders are not adequately involved. Only those organizations are being entertained who are approaching APNIC, others are possibly not been taken care of.

-          Late entrant organizations are paying a higher price for their addresses as compared to those who came earlier.  By giving a suggestion “to go for reservation after 25% exhaustion of the IPv6 address space”, a situation like IPv4 is being encouraged in which organizations that will come at a later date will be made to pay a higher price than what it would cost them today.  

(d)   APNIC may like to set up some kind of a study to work out the details covering all the countries in the APNIC region and suitably address the issues in their policy.   

 

3.       Conflict between “Operational Policies of NIR” and prop-100 (Comment Chu-Yi)

It is possible that that there may be conflict between prop-100 and NIR policy. Existing policies may need review and changes made wherever needed.

4.       Comments by M/s Reliance (Indian Service Provider)

They have suggested working out a mode of distribution of IPv6 addresses to different organizations if a large block is given. I would like to state that this mode of distribution can be left to the individual countries provided they are not in conflict with APNIC policies. As far as India is concerned it can be done by proposed NIR involving all stakeholders.  

 

In addition to above, I will also like to tell that many technical comments have also been given to prop-100 and people have tried to examine this proposal entirely on its technicalities. But the purpose of proposal prop-100 is to ask the APNIC community to make a policy for reservation of contiguous IP address blocks of certain minimum size for all countries in the APNIC region whether they are demanding or not so that they can meet out the requirements of their organizations out of these reserved blocks. There is nothing much technical about it. Though I have mentioned some technical advantages, but these are not the sole purpose of the proposal. The proposal is all about judicious planning and distribution of addresses with a long term perspective.

 

(R.M.Agarwal)

(B.K.Nath)