Policy Statement on Address Space Allocations

>It's the other way round: SPRINT should tell his customers he can't
>guarantee 100% global Internet connectivity because he disagrees with
>the current address allocation policy of the IANA/InterNIC/RIPE NCC/AP-NIC.
>They might want to look for a different transit provider...

That assumes that Sprint is, in fact, the root problem here.
The root problem is that lots of routers will be running out
of space to store routes soon, and that *everyone* soon will
be seeing the problems.  Sprint perhaps a little earlier than
the rest, hence them leading the effort to correct policies,
but they are not alone.

We are now closer to running out of Router capability than IP numbers
to hand out.  A rational solution to that would be to allocate IP
space in a manner such that we don't run out of Router capability
before we run out of IP space, by assigning easier-to-route,
larger CIDR blocks to large providers, and allowing growth space
in allocations so that small allocations can grow without having
to add more announcements.  If the allocating agencies continue to
insist on being as sparing as possible with block allocations, which
is noticably increasing routing problems, then we are going to face
Internet partitions sooner rather than later, based on router load
rather than running out of IP space.  This is, in my opinion, a poor
choice for overall growth.


-george william herbert
gherbert at crl.com