97.128.0.0/9 allocation to verizon wireless

Mailman List Mirror (Read Only)
1

Dear list,

Since IPv4 exhaustion is an increasingly serious and timely topic
lately, I would like to point out something that interests me, and maybe
everyone else who will be spending a lot on Tylenol and booze when we
really do run out of v4 IPs.

I have trouble understanding why an ARIN record for a network regularly
receiving new, out-sized IPv4 allocations on the order of millions of
addresses at once would publish a remark like the one below, indicating
that Verizon Wireless has about 2 million IPs allocated.

OrgName: Cellco Partnership DBA Verizon Wireless
CIDR: 97.128.0.0/9
Comment: Verizon Wireless currently has 44.3 Million
Comment: subscribers with 2.097 Million IP addresses allocated.
RegDate: 2008-04-14

This may be unscientific and full of error, but if you add up all the
IPs behind AS6167, you get a pretty big number, about 27 million. If I
make more dangerous assumptions, I might argue that a network with a
need for 2 million IPs, at the time this /9 was handed out, already had
about 19 million. Then it received 8 million more.

Sure, smart phones are becoming more popular. It's reasonable to assume
that virtually all cell phones will eventually have an IP address almost
all the time. But that isn't the case right now, and the ARIN is in the
business of supplying its members with six months worth of addresses.
If everyone is expected to run out and buy a new phone and start using
"the Google" right away, and stay on it all the time, maybe cellular
operators really need a lot more IP addresses. If not, why does Verizon
Wireless have 27 million IPs when the above comment indicates they need
only a tenth of that?

- j

2

Whatever happened to NAT?

Jeff

3

Any cell phone that uses data service to download a ringtone, wallpaper,
picature, use their TV/radio webcast service, or their walkie talkie feature
will use an IP address.

In addition to that Verizon wireless sells their EVDO aircards for laptops.

Given the size of their customer base it is not shocking that they have 27
million IP addresses in their pool. ARIN doesn't just give them away it
would be up to Verizon to prove that they are utilizing 90+% before they
could be alloted any additional IP's.

Hope this helps explain things a little bit.

-Tim Eberhard

Sure, smart phones are becoming more popular. It's reasonable to assume

4

Why don't you try asking them?

OrgTechHandle: MGE16-ARIN<http://ws.arin.net/whois/?queryinput=P%20!%20MGE16-ARIN>
OrgTechName: George, Matt
OrgTechPhone: +1-908-306-7000
OrgTechEmail: abuse@verizonwireless.com

5

I have trouble understanding why an ARIN record for a network regularly
receiving new, out-sized IPv4 allocations on the order of millions of
OrgName: Cellco Partnership DBA Verizon Wireless
CIDR: 97.128.0.0/9
Comment: Verizon Wireless currently has 44.3 Million
Comment: subscribers with 2.097 Million IP addresses allocated.
RegDate: 2008-04-14

If they have immediately allocated 2.097 million out of 8.388
million, then they
have satisfied the 25% immediate utilization requirement.

In fact, 2.097 million is exactly how many they would need immediate
use for in order to justify an allocation of 8 million IPs according
to ARIN policy.

I expect the 2.097 million figure applies only to this particular
range, this comment in whois does
not indicate that Verizon has _only_ assigned that many across all
its various ranges; I would fully expect they have massively more
IPs in use.

I would expect ARIN would have followed policy, and so Verizon had to
show to ARIN their well-founded
projection that within one year, at least 50% of the new assignment
would be allocated.

And also that they met the additional requirements for ISPs; 80%
utilization over all previous
allocations, and also 80% of their most recent allocation.

6

The numbers I keep seeing for so-called "smartphones" in the press for U.S. and Europe are 49% and 50% within two years, respectively. Here's an article you might find interesting about the U.S. domestic market, and it may help you calculate what sort of growth rate we can expect in the future, when combined with both of the above numbers. Put another way, the news is bad, but there is a cap on growth.

http://albuquerque.bizjournals.com/dallas/stories/2008/09/29/story10.html

Eliot

7

Eliot Lear wrote:

Sure, smart phones are becoming more popular. It's reasonable to assume
that virtually all cell phones will eventually have an IP address almost
all the time.

The numbers I keep seeing for so-called "smartphones" in the press for
U.S. and Europe are 49% and 50% within two years, respectively. Here's
an article you might find interesting about the U.S. domestic market,
and it may help you calculate what sort of growth rate we can expect in
the future, when combined with both of the above numbers. Put another
way, the news is bad, but there is a cap on growth.

We live in rather sad times if, subscriber, arpu and internet usage
growth is considered bad news.

8

Exactly.

9

I have no personal knowledge of this situation, so this is wild
speculation.

http://news.cnet.com/verizon-completes-alltel-purchase/

Verizon Wireless is going to be soon selling operations in 105
markets. It may well be that the IP addresses for those markets
will be transfered to the new company as well, and you'll see some
of these blocks leave their name soon. It could also be that AllTel
had a much lower percentage of subscribers using data, and Verizon
is fixing to change that soon.

With the merger complete Verizon Wireless will have 83.7 million
subscribers (per the article). I see 27,371,520 IP's in all their
advertised blocks now, add in the 8,388,608 they just got, for a
total of 35,760,128. If we assume across all blocks they can get
80% USAGE efficiency (which would surprise me) that's enough IP's to
feed data to 28,608,102 subs. That would mean they can serve about
34% of their customers with data.

Lastly, you've assumed that only a "smart phone" (not that the term
is well defined) needs an IP address. I believe this is wrong.
There are plenty of simpler phones (e.g. not a PDA, touch screen,
read your e-mail thing) that can use cellular data to WEP browse,
or to fetch things like ring tones. They use an IP on the network.

By the same math they have 55.1 million (83.7 million subs - 28.6
they can serve now) they can't serve data to yet, and using the
same 80% effiency that will take another 68.9 million addresses to
do that. A /6 has 67.1 million addresses, so I suspect you'll see
over time another /6, or two /7's, or four /8's, or eight /9's.......

Which leaves us with two take aways:

1) The comment is weird.

2) If one company is likely to need four more /8's, and there are now
   32 in the free pool man is IPv4 in trouble. At this point it
   would only take eight companies the size of verizon wireless to
   exhaust the free pool WORLDWIDE. No matter how much effort we put
   into reclaiming IPv4 space there's just no way to keep up with new
   demand.

Is your network IPv6 enabled yet?

10

Leo Bicknell:

Lastly, you've assumed that only a "smart phone" (not that the term

is well defined) needs an IP address. I believe this is wrong.
There are plenty of simpler phones (e.g. not a PDA, touch screen,
read your e-mail thing) that can use cellular data to WEP browse,
or to fetch things like ring tones. They use an IP on the network.

Alternatively, Verizon is planning to build an all-IP NGN architecture in
the near future, or is at least providing for the possibility of building
one. Mobilkom Austria, for example, has done a deal with Fring to put their
SIP VoIP client on handsets and serve their voice traffic over IP. In that
case, you'd need IP addresses for all the people who use VOICE.

You can do ringtones and the like through USSD...but there's no escape from
voice.

11

The term is ill defined, but the general connotation is that they will be supplanting dumb phones. So say what you will,phones with IP addresses is likely to increase as a percentage of the installed base. The only thing offsetting that is the indication that the U.S. is saturating on total # of cell phones, which is what that article says.

Moving on...

Eliot

12

Of course, my iPhone is currently showing an IP address in 10/8, and
though my EVDO card shows a global address in 70.198/16, I can't ssh to
it -- a TCP traceroute appears to be blocked at the border of Verizon
Wireless' network. But hey, at least I can ping it. (Confirmed by
tcpdump on my laptop: the pings are not being spoofed by a border
router.)

    --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb

13

NAT? why isn't Verizon 'It's the Network' Wireless using IPv6?
<speaking-from-ass>there should be a FOIA-like method to see large
allocation justifications</ass>

14

Realistically, I suppose Verizon Wireless is big enough to dictate to
the manufacturers of handsets and infrastructure, "you must support IPv6
by X date or we will no longer buy / sell your product." I wonder if
any wireless carriers are doing this today?

What services require an IP, whether they can be supplied via NAT, how
soon "smart phone" adoption will bring IP to every handset ... all these
are good and valid points. However, they all distract from the glaring
and obvious reality that there is no current explanation for Verizon
Wireless needing 27M IPs.

Does ARIN lack sufficient resources to vet jumbo requests?

Did Verizon Wireless benefit from favoritism?

Is Barack Obama concerned that his blackberry will not function if
Verizon one day runs out of v4 addresses for its customers?

- j

15

Does ARIN lack sufficient resources to vet jumbo requests?

I am fairly confident ARIN followed their policies.
The existing policies allow anyone (including Verizon)
to make a request for (and receive) a /9 with appropriate
justification.

If you do not like the policies, please participate
in the ARIN policy process and work to change them.

  Mailing lists:

  arin-ppml@arin.net

  Open to the general public. Provides a forum to
  raise and discuss policy-related ideas and issues
  surrounding existing and proposed ARIN policies.
  The PPML list is an intrinsic part of ARIN's Policy
  Development Process (PDP), which details how
  proposed policies are handled.

16

This discussion about smartphones and the like was presuming that those
devices all received public IPs -- my experience has been more often than
not that they get RFC 1918 addresses.

Frank

17

For better or worse, Verizon hands out globally routable addresses for smartphones. (Certainly, the one I've got has one.) They seem to come from the same pool as data card links.

Note that I suspect that there's a nontrivial number of folk that are used to using some not quite really NAT friendly protocols like IPsec on their (targeted-for-business primarily <not iPhone> smartphones). (Yeah, there's IPsec NAT-T, which I've seen fall flat on its face countless times.)

Breaking that sort of connectivity is likely to be hard to swallow for some nontrivial portion of some of their customers.

- S

18

Probably because Verizon Business isn't using it, unless you count a
couple of lab GRE tunnels.

Drive Slow,
Paul Wall

19

27 million IP addresses for 45 million customers with addressable
devices sounds well within ARIN's justification guidelines.

Just because most of your customers are trying to pull the wool over
ARIN's eyes doesn't mean Verizon is too. :slight_smile:

Drive Slow,
Paul Wall

20

so... actually... if you ask for v6 apparently vzb's deployment is
still moving along and is accessible for customers.

FiOS/DSL though is not :frowning:

-Chris