Fixed Boundary (/29) Assignments

On Thu, 8 Feb 2001, Neil J. McRae wrote:

> I don't think anyone is sitting on the extreme side of the fence. To use
> your example, its fair to say that most dialup customers don't need
> static IP, and those that do should get what they need.

I'm very inclined to agree. Unfortunately, telco marketing departments
have subzero IP clue. So, what are the implications if telco xDSL LIR's
start handing out /29's as standard netnames?

1. Millions of /29 objects in the RIPE database.
2. Millions of /29 RIPE-141 requests (noting that the startup LIR's will
   have AW=0).
3. RIPE is effectively powerless to force deallocation.

Literally, the order of magnitude is 10^6. No. 3 is based on experience -
RIPE NCC being community based, it is hard to take space away from users.
I'm not referring to unused LIR /16's here.

Another gotcha for the policy-enforcers: RIPE NCC does not set operational
policy. I don't speak on RIPE's behalf but I do know several staff
personally and although this is never explicit, the conservation of IP
space is not achieved through stating "You may only have this many for
this function".

Any address *usage* is acceptable, as long as there is one. This is a
subtle gotcha. I have known the NCC make recommendations, and I'm sure
this discussion will lead to one.

I would suggest that, as well as approaching the LIR wg, the NCC
approaches the xDSL providers en masse directly to achieve a consensus. I
doubt that every telco beginner LIR is reading this.

Can I also point to RFC3021, using 31-bit prefixes for point-to-point
links? This is relevant.

Joshua