[address-policy-wg] 2006-05 New Policy Proposal (PI Assignment Size)

I also support this proposal. Being at the "receiving end" of an ISP, 
we've seen customer requirements often enough - many times we have been 
able to redirect the customer wishes towards regular PA space (which of 
course we'd rather assign, as it keeps customer "in line" more than PI), 
but larger places often have gone through IP renumbering before 
(sometimes when switching to us), so they know the cost involved. The 
prospect of e.g. shelling out the time & money for renumbering again is 
not very appealing. Of course, those bigger places often require more 
than a /24, so the issue of non-routable PIs doesn't necessarily apply.
Anyway, there are situations where the number of IPs involved is 
smaller, but the implications are a lot bigger - best example is the 
current PI I had been asked to request - while the usage is somewhere in 
the 90 area (totalling in at or around /25+/26 given the network 
structure and organization), RIPE proposed assigning a /26+/27 which is 
(of course) useless. While the number of currently used IPs would not 
necessarily warant a /24 due to rather low work changing THOSE IPs, they 
are currently in the first roll-out phase of POS terminals - boxes, 
which have the destination for their communication hard-coded in Flash. 
Of course chaging one is possible, but imagine doing that on several 
tenthousands of the boxes at some point ... you will understand that the 
cost involved is not paid from pocket change ... my mistake was not 
artificially blowing up the requirements in order to end up in the 
230-250 IPs range but attaching a correct, real IP plan ... :(

Dmitry Kiselev wrote:
> On my practice multihoming PI users ask one more prefix each time
> the previous one exhausted. Its coused by difficults while receiving
> one large enough PI subnet. Instead of becoming LIR and have no
> problems with PA, such users save money and got a couple of small
> PIs for a space solution... Yeah, here, in xUSSR, it is common
> practice. :(

What's the point in making end users (as in Companies, etc.) register as 
an LIR just because they want (or need) a network of their own? The main 
reason is not being dependent of a single provider, being able to switch 
  providers when technically necessary without a sh at tload of problems 
and quite non-trivial cost issues afterwards due to changes in IP 
addresses ... being an LIR is pointless for non-ISPs or SMBs (and most 
likely for large ones, too).

Erich Hohermuth wrote:
 > increase the prefixes. If someone ask for multihoming with PI Space, it
 > makes sense that we assign a size which will work with the current
 > filtering policies. But maybe we have to change the policy about PI
 > Space in general ? The question is, which "problems" do we rate as a
 > higher risk; waste of ip space, amount of prefixes, reach ability of a
 > subnet. What do you think ?

Multihoming as such I don't see as the core reason for PI space - 
assigning PA space by two providers isn't a problem, less so than 
announcing the same size PI prefix, as there should always be a 
less-specific /19 or bigger to fall back to ...

If the amount of prefixes were a reason, shouldn't ISPs be (en)forced to 
aggregate their announcements? Looking at e.g. the peering tables I get 
at DECIX or via our uplinks, I see hundreds and thousands of subnets 
announced by providers from their own PA space, broken down into _many_ 
subnets, additionally to the aggregated prefix. And I don't think all 
(or even a mentionable percentage of) those customers are multi-homed 
and therefore require the smaller announcement be made due to 
more-specific routing ... at that point, possibly 25% of the routing 
tables could be saved ...

Rather, in order to discourage PI usage by endusers who don't actually 
need a PI network from a technical standpoint, why not charge an 
appropriate amount for assigning PI networks? Please correct me if I got 
this wrong, but at the moment, PI networks count towards the LIR's 
rating. Which can end up - in a way - to be unfair, as PI networks are 
requested for end customer, which may at some point in the future switch 
providers. The points are still counted, even though the provider does 
not have any revenue to count against it. By defining a rate of €X per 
/24 would one on hand reduce the requested size of the requests, and 
also make users think twice about requesting technically unnecessary PI 
space ...

Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com wrote:
 > If the organization is simultaneously applying for an AS
 > number or the organization already has an AS number, then
 > we should consider routing to be a major issue if the
 > organization says that it is. After all, the only purpose
 > of having an AS number is to do routing.

Indeed. Still, an AS should not be a prerequisite though, as using an PI 
could be the first part of setting up "advanced routing".

Regards, -garry