Apparently bought in two chunks: 3.0.0.0/9 and 3.128.0.0/9.
Previous owner was GE.
Anecdotal reports across the Internet that AWS EIPs are now being assigned in that range.
https://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-3-0-0-0-1.html
https://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-3-128-0-0-1.html
http://maps.measurement-factory.com/
It's a great purchase for them, and a shot at Azure and GCP - Amazon can now legitimately tell larger clients "we will have enough IPv4 space to be your partner for all your static-IP-dependent applications, no matter how much you need to scale."
https://www.caida.org/research/id-consumption/whois-map/imag...
Each pixel in the image is a /24 network.
[1]: https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2017/05/mit-goes-on-ipv...
Sure its a big block, but its still "only" ~16 million addresses
Hugged to death.
that sort of thing would be cool to learn
On a Local network, multicast is very easy to do. Unless it's very, very old your computer almost certainly uses multicast on local networks already, for a variety of purposes. A dumb old network just sent all packets to all computers on the local network, so both broadcast and multicast were equally easy to do, your network card has a filter built into it, that autonomously weeds out messages your computer cares about, and ignores the others - so the Operating system is like "Hey, network card, my unicast address is 10.20.30.40, and I am also listening to multicast address 224.0.0.251" and it will just throw away any packets that aren't for those addresses. A smart modern network (e.g. the mid-range gigabit switch serving your desk at work) keeps track of which addresses are where and sends copies of messages only to where they seem useful, leaving more network bandwidth for everybody else.
The Internet can in theory do Multicast too. I've used this to, for example, watch television with a dozen other people without any copy of the TV picture data being sent over the shared data link to us more than once. That's what those addresses are for, you "Join" one of the multicast addresses and begin receiving, say, the Olympics live.
However making all this work is hard, and in most places, most of the time, nobody puts in all that hard work, so probably you'll find that although local network multicast works for you (as I said it's used in modern systems) you cannot use the Internet's multicast features. Which is a shame, but we can't have nice things.
AFRINIC: African Network Information Center ARIN: American Registry for Internet Numbers APNIC: Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre LACNIC: Latin America and Caribbean Network Information Centre RIPE: Réseaux IP Européens
it's mostly used for internet television or other multimedia stuff.
(some stuff is/was unallocated, since some early users tought it's a good idea to actually use some unallocated stuff to do bgp..., testing or routing per se (especially cisco routers) or even login pages, exist nodes, i.e. 1.0.0.0 was a problematic ip, but since cloudflare grabbed the 1.1.1.1 I think people will stop doing stupid things)
It's pretty crazy though that that huge range goes to Amazon in full. Wouldn't it have been better for the health of the internet as a whole to get them back to IANA for redistribution?
Meanwhile, if Amazon is going to use all these in the medium-term future, that seems OK to me.
(3.3.3.3 and 3.2.1.0 would be more memorable.)
Deleted Comment
At this point it seems like a desperate play by a company with deeply entrenched IPv4-only infrastructure (hi EC2) to eke out more time without major upgrades. Meanwhile IPv4 addresses remain scarce for small ISPs, and the (healthy, natural) push to IPv6 infrastructure continues apace everywhere else.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/get-started...
While it doesn't support live comparison of DNS results, it can log out entries per DNS resolver and you can post-process those logs to validate their responses against each other, considering your queries will over time hit different resolvers. Not perfect since there are legitimate reasons to return different responses over time, but it's something.
[1] https://github.com/jedisct1/dnscrypt-proxy [2] https://github.com/jedisct1/dnscrypt-proxy/wiki/Load-Balanci...
What kind of tricks are you afraid of these DNS services could get up to?
Do they then cover Seattle in stickers and chalking with 3.3.3.3?
-ss
Dead Comment
ISPs can basically get all the IPv6 resources they need, but IPv4 addresses are becoming scarce and costly. Amazon just spent a lot of money to get more IPv4 addresses: that's cost, not profit.
If Amazon owned all the addresses and they were making great profits as a monopoly seller, this would indeed be an incentive not to move to IPv6. Instead, it's really just driving up people's costs.
Adoption is slow because the extra costs of IPv4 addresses are still smaller than the costs of really getting every piece of infrastructure and software working correctly with IPv6. We're not that far away, but there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem until we're close enough that people can start to turn off IPv4 and effectively force stragglers to adopt.
That IPV6 adoption is slow is precisy because buying ranges of IPV4 addresses is still cheap enough that people are doing it.
They also have 18.128.0.0/9, bought from MIT.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws-ip-ranges....
https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json
At $14 per IP: 2^24 * $14 = $235mm
Price per IP estimated from:
In 2011, Microsoft paid $11.25 per IP to Nortel for 666k addressesDepending on how much it actually cost I feel like it could be a number of things from simple branding to nefarious traffic shaping. If you're an AWS shop maybe they want you to be able to set simple bypass/static route for 3.0.0.0/8.
No clear prescriptions for legacy v4 <-> v6 translations, religious hate of NAT, unfortunate separator character (the colon) that is used for domain:port separation. Separate stack prescriptions.
I honestly think it would have been easier to do a rolling upgrade of the internet to support bigger numbers in the four coordinates of IP addresses and increase the number of ports.
I'm obviously not a deep networking expert, but as I've been exposed to IPv6 test conversions it's been painful.
Customer <> us Office <> us Us @aws <> us @azure
With having so many customers there are probably enough with use cases which requires that ipv4 and having them is probably a necessity.
Dead Comment
So you got a /8 by asking for one; they handed them out for free.
Same goes for DNS. You used to request the name and it was yours. No yearly fees.
The IP blocks were never reclaimed because it was pointless. Even now clawing back the big /8 assignments only kicks the can down the road for a year, maybe two.
My company has a /32 ipv6 space. That's 79228162514264337593543950336 /128s. And we got it by... just asking for it.
I know everyone's shouting about "there are enough IPs for every atom on earth!" but just like "no one understood that over half of all humans would be on the internet", maybe we'll need more IPs in the future becuase of some unforeseen development... it seems silly to be handing out blocks like this just for giggles.
Perhaps it didn't feel like it as much at the time, since only huge corporations had the need for so many computers.
Companies like Merck and Ford, Universities like MIT, don't appear to have paid a dime for them.
The recent purchase of OpenShift may be a good answer to 'I wonder what they are intending to do with a /8 in a year'.
Why does Amazon want it? - Amazon has a lot of customers who want EC2/ELB instances with their own IP addresses. IPv4 addresses are a scarce resource.
Why did GE have it? When the IPv4 address space was formed, various big US companies managed to get the initial IP address allocations. You can see more on these allocations here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...
Why so many upvotes? It's relatively rare to see what is 1/255th of the IPv4 address space sold.
Also, That Wikipedia article was particularly helpful. I knew the /32 was specific to my IP that I use but didn't realize the sheer scale of those blocks.
Amazon probably wants it to sell to their customers who need ipv4 instead of v6