I first wrote about the grey market in IPv4 addresses when Microsoft (MSFT) bought Nortel‘s IPv4 IP block back in 2011. A recent article from CircleID proves the market has caught up with Bach Seat. In the CircleID article, Doug Madory, Director of Internet Analysis at Dyn reports that the market for IPv4 addresses is heating up especially in Europe.
RIPE’s IPv4 transfers
According to Dyn, statistics from RIPE, the European registrar, show that the IPv4 market has heated up. RIPE’s table of transfers of provider aggregatable (PA) IPv4 address clearly shows a rapidly increasing rate of transfers of IPv4 address blocks and unique IPv4 addresses. In fact:
February 2015 saw the most organizational transfers (373).- November 2014 saw the most unique address transfers (nearly 2 million).
- The number of transfers in the RIPE region far outpaces any other region.
Romania is a key player in IPv4
An analysis of the RIPE data by the author finds that Romania is a key player in the IPv4 market.
During 2014/15 1,069 (58%) transfers came from Romanian organizations.- 947 (51%) of all the blocks transferred in the RIPE region were from a single Romanian organization, namely, Jump.ro.
- Jump is willing to sell large blocks of IPv4 address space (around $10/address) or lease smaller blocks for $0.50/address/year.
- Of the 4,656 routed prefixes that make up the Saudi Arabia part of the Internet, 1,498 or almost a third of them were Romanian just a few months ago.
- The Syrian state telecom got 5.155.0.0/16 from Romania’s Nav Telecom last August and Iranian telecoms bought over 1 million unique IP addresses in 85 transfers over the past year (80% from Jump.ro).
- Saudi Telecom received 17 IPv4 transfers since September last year representing over 1.5 million IP addresses: 14 were from Romanian sources and the other 3 were from
- Ukraine. At $10/address, those addresses would have cost Saudi Telecom $15 million.
A side-effect of the IPv4 gray market is abetting the growth of global routing tables to dangerous levels. The first effects of this were seen in August 2014 when BGP routing tables grew to over 512,000 routes when many older routers could no longer properly track the routes. ZDNet explains that routes are typically kept in a specialized kind of memory called Tertiary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) which has a limited capacity which fails when it is full.
The author asks what are the implications of all this? Now that the Romanians have demonstrated that there is a lucrative business to be had in selling off IPv4 address space, will we see ISPs in developing countries rush to sell off their address space for some quick cash? If such sales result in the IPv4 space getting sliced more and more thinly, we can surely expect the global routing table to increase in size, perhaps dramatically, as a result.
Will this cause more router meltdowns?
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
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