Re: Policy Statement on Address Space Allocations

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

On Sat, 27 Jan 1996, David R. Conrad wrote:

> > 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.
>
> Ah, the "Bill Manning Solution"(tm).  Now if we could only get ISPs
> like Sprint to play, Bill could get his Nobel Internet Prize.  The ISP
> you work for should be strongly commended, but I gather it wasn't done
> entirely voluntarily...

Well, not entirely.  We looked at the situation and decided it was now or 
never to get our customers into a multihome-able block.  Fortunately, 
all of our customers have been more than understanding about why they 
need to move, especially with some of Sprint's past connectivity problems.

> > 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.
>
> But what is the discriminator?  RIPE-NCC and APNIC essentially use
> charging (e.g., to get a service provider block in the AP region, we
> request US $2500/year minimum).  Would this be sufficient in the US to
> reduce the number of ISP requests InterNIC is currently experiencing
> (and I should note that the request rate has apparently doubled over 6
> months)?

Setting a high fee would definately keep the "two high school student ISP" 
out of the /18 block business.  However, I know that some startup ISP's 
wouldn't blink twice at $2500 a year, but their technical people can't 
even spell BGP.

> And what would InterNIC do with the money?

Probably the same it's doing with the millions it's collecting from the 
.COM, .ORG, and .NET domain registrations, whatever that is.

-forrestc () imach com