Policy Statement on Address Space Allocations

At 2:41 PM 30/1/96, Andrew Partan wrote:
>> The proper solution is for all these companies to form a consortium. The
>> consortium would run the NAP and contract with multiple NSP's for
>> service. In that case, the NSP's are not providing transit to
>> non-customers because the consortium is the customer and every ISP who
>> joins the consortium gets multihoming reliability outside the region.
>
>Ah - we may have something that works - we have someone (the
>consortium) being paid (by these companies) to provide (or further
>purchase) transit.

My initial message may have been terse, but I was certainly not expecting
the "deviant CIX" or "specialized NAP" or "Agregating CIDR Internet Detour"
(ACID, (tm)) to provide world wide reachability for free.  In fact, it is
providing a service at a cost.  The service is to provide reachability to
smallish 192/27 single home or multihomed networks.  It does so by
aggregating several such networks into a larger, CIDR routable, 192/8 (or
/10, or /15).  The cost is indeed that the transit traffic goes through the
ACID, consume bandwidth and other resources, and that these resources have
to be payed for.  In short, networks owners pay for not having to renumber;
how much they are ready to pay depends on how expensive their renumbering
will be.

Paying can be done in many way, from the "consortium" which you suggest to
some fees to a service company that operates the ACID.  In fact, the major
roadblock here is the intrisic monopoly -- at first sight, there can only
be one ACID for a given aggregate.  This may trigger all sorts of
regulatory questions.

Sharing of resource between consortium members or service customers may be
done either the usual way (i.e. FIFO and random luck) or in a more
organized way, e.g. using class based queuing.

Christian Huitema