Re: Policy Statement on Address Space Allocations

["Forrest W. Christian" <forrestc () imach com>]

You know, Sean, that as I was reading this paragraph:

On Sat, 27 Jan 1996, Sean Doran wrote:
> I am willing to bet my farm that SprintLink could never
> support large numbers of dialup end users in a reasonable
> way and do so in a manner that is cost-competitive with
> our customers.

I was actally thinking of responding with a paragraph similar to
this paragraph:

> In fact, the bulk of our cutomers who are reading this
> message may well quip that SprintLink has done a just barely
> tolerable job of supporting its current customer base.

Unfortunately, you beat me to the punch.

> That medicine is called CIDR (Call it data robitussin?), and
> helping roll out ANYTHING that will encourage people to
> avoid increasing the size of routing tables in the routers
> of the world which are most CPU bound right now.
>
> The encouragement, IMHO, should be in the form of the work
> PIER is addressing (sorry about the pun), some possible
> future renumbering tools, NATs, or any other technology
> which results in making a change of addresses painless and
> quick, so that people have little or no reason to object to
> using provider-supplied addresses.

I agree.  But in the interim, ISP's which are also in the registry 
"business" need to be able to get a large enough block to be able to 
allocate to their customers without worries about what happens when they 
need to use the poor-quality service clause in their contract, or when 
they go multi-homed and end up producing multiple routes in the 
registry.  If the ISP I do sysadmin for was to go multihomed 
tomorrow, instead of a couple of months from now, we'd be announcing 7 separate 
routes.  Instead we're making all our customers renumber into the /18 
block we succeeded in finally wrestling away from the internic by 
agreeing to returning over an /18's worth of ip address space.

That said, I don't think every new ISP should get an /18 block.  For 
example, there are four other ISP's in the community here, and only one 
of them would probably even know what the term CIDR meant.

> Have you ever met an RBOC data person?

Yeah.  They're wonderful people.  They sell cisco routers to companies 
based on their (the RBOC's) great service and support and when they screw 
them up, people like me get to go straighten the system out for a good 
chunk of change.

-forrestc