Elise Gerich presented the IANA report at LACNIC 24, and highlighted a side-effect of the decision-free agreed mechanism to share out the returned IPv4 addresses to the five RIRs. This is a twice-yearly process, based on an agreed formula.
Because this is a robotic, automatic process based on dividing up the pool of returned addresses, it has to respect the fragment sizes its presented with. Unfortunately, each time this is divided by five, it leaves a little bit over, and the net result of this is that the distribution process will continue coming in smaller and smaller units, possibly all the way through to 2020 when the final /24 is handed to each RIR. Its almost as if we designed the method to almost, but not quite work! (like when you don’t have the right change and wind up giving somebody back more coins than they gave you, because you don’t have units to hand of the right size).
Elise was half-joking, when she said that we could (as a community) decide to make some adjustment to this if we wanted the hand-out to align better with five ‘pieces of cake’ (my words) and so get to runout faster, but IANA can’t do that of itself: It has to be done by the community in the global policy development process.
Perhaps we want to consider it? Or maybe, having the runout proceed in smaller and smaller units, is a good thing? What do you think?
The views expressed by the authors of this blog are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of APNIC. Please note a Code of Conduct applies to this blog.