New ISPs getting of the ground without IPv4?

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1

Surprisingly enough demand for Internet services did not end when we ran out of IPv4. I'd like to hear from the guys and gals starting new ISPs how they are facing this brave new world.

Is it NATs all the way down?

Is IPv6 the knight in shining armor?

Are you getting enough IPs? If not, how are you coping? Buying/renting some, tunneling to somebody who has some, what?

It's all good and well hearing about how you should dual stack and reading about how established players handle IPv6 and IPv4 exhaustion, but what do you do when dual stacking isn't an option and IPv6 only takes you so far?

Now is your chance to shine and bring us some tales from the trenches :slight_smile:

Jared

2

nanog-isp@mail.com writes:

Surprisingly enough demand for Internet services did not end when we
ran out of IPv4. I'd like to hear from the guys and gals starting new
ISPs how they are facing this brave new world.

I can help. We're a cable company operating in Atlantic City who hope
to have 800 beta customers launched between November 30 and February 1.

Is it NATs all the way down?

We've got two large NAT pools and a /24 set aside for customers who must
absolutely be globally routable for IPv4. We're trying to qualify as
few customers for this need as possible.

Is IPv6 the knight in shining armor?

We're going to try to deploy as many people as we can as native
IPv6-only customers but we also expect there to be a considerable amount
of protest to this idea. In which case, we'd simply turn IPv4 on for
them and NAT them.

It's disgusting how much stuff out there still doesn't support IPv6.
We're all ready for that with NAT64 on the edge for sites like twitter
and 464XLAT for devices that support it.

But just off the top of my head, we know we're going to run into
problems with people's XBox 360s and anyone who uses PSN (that's all PS3
and PS4 users as of this writing), Skype, Android on wifi, etc.

Are you getting enough IPs? If not, how are you coping? Buying/renting
some, tunneling to somebody who has some, what?

We wish we had enough address space to give everyone a globally routable
IPv4 address; alas, we don't.

We're on ARIN's waiting list. We're also trolling the transfer market
and keeping our eyes open for anyone who might like to put their company
up for sale for its resources and revenue.

It's all good and well hearing about how you should dual stack and
reading about how established players handle IPv6 and IPv4 exhaustion,
but what do you do when dual stacking isn't an option and IPv6 only
takes you so far?

We're just going to limp along as best we can until the rest of the
world wises up. BTW, hardware NAT costs $$$. So the barrier for entry
is pretty high right now.

3

Surprisingly enough demand for Internet services did not end when we ran
out of IPv4. I'd like to hear from the guys and gals starting new ISPs how
they are facing this brave new world.

Is it NATs all the way down?

No NAT.

Is IPv6 the knight in shining armor?

We have IPv6 (dual stack) but mostly because it is the right thing to do
and a few tech savvy customers appreciate it.

Are you getting enough IPs? If not, how are you coping? Buying/renting
some, tunneling to somebody who has some, what?

We buy them at approx $10 each. This is of course a burden. However we have
many costs in establishing a new customer. Our GPON ONU is much more than
the cost to get the IP-address.

It's all good and well hearing about how you should dual stack and reading
about how established players handle IPv6 and IPv4 exhaustion, but what do
you do when dual stacking isn't an option and IPv6 only takes you so far?

I do not know how to answer that given that dual stack _is_ an option.

We have two basic options. One is to buy address space. The other is NAT.
Neither is free. We came to the conclusion that buying address space is the
best option for us. We believe that NAT would cause some customers to
choose a different ISP and that NAT can be almost as expensive per customer
if you factor in all costs.

I am still not too worried about the price of IPv4 address space. Many
companies have huge amounts of space that can be reclaimed and sold off.
This is especially true in the ARIN region. IPv4 space will always be
available, it is just a matter of how expensive it will be.

I hope that IPv6 becomes more widespread in the coming years. That should
lead to less customers that care about a global routable IPv4 address . As
a larger fraction of the traffic moves to IPv6 the carrier NAT solution
will scale better.

Regards,

Baldur

4

The two I am working with are factoring buying IP space as part of the business model. Folks like Cogent are now charging a $50 BGP fee so it is a new world. I am seeing more and more folks go to MPLS to try and squeeze as many IPs out as they can. They are flattening their customer pools and saving a few IPs here and there.

A couple others are paying for circuits they no longer use just to hold onto IP space.

Justin Wilson
j2sw@mtin.net

5

Well, APNIC ran out years ago, so as someone with experience running a residential ISP with very limited IPv4 I can tell you that the overwhelming majority of customers don't know or care that they are running behind CGNAT as long as you are upfront about it (in the FAQ's, no you can't run a server on this service). One /24 is good for about 16k broadband users without major issues (apart from dealing with random blocks by our "friends" at "playstation"). Overall it just works and nobody notices. You will want a good DDOS scrubbing solution though as you can't just block a destination IP that happens to be in one of your IP pools.