Dalays in RIPE NCC Registration Services

[Daniel Karrenberg <]

Dear customers,

as some of you will unfortunately have noticed, the response time of the
RIPE NCC registration services has increased considerably compared to
the very short times most of you were used to.  'Hostmaster' currently
has a queue of more than 200 requests, 'in-addr' is above 70.  This is
mainly due to increased load. 'time permitting' requeste are not
processed at all at this time.

Please consider the following graph which plots the total number of
mesages received by registration services per quarter:


   3500++---------------------------------------------------+
        |                                                   |
        |                                              A    |
   3000++                                             *     |
        |                                           **      |
        |                                          *        |
   2500++                                         *         |
        |                                       *A          |
        |                                    ***            |
   2000++                                 *A*               |
        |                              ***                  |
        |                           *A*                     |
   1500++                        ***                        |
        |                     *A*                           |
        |                   **                              |
   1000++                 **                                |
        |             ***A                                  |
        |         *A**                                      |
    500++      ***                                          |
        |    A*                                             |
        |                                                   |
      0++----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----+
           Q2/93 Q3/93 Q4/93 Q1/94 Q2/94 Q3/94 Q4/94 Q1/95


Unfortunately during the last 12 months we have not been able to
increase staff resources in accordance with expected load because
problems with 1994 revenue and the initially unclear revenue situation
for 1995 did not allow that. 

Fortunately we can now be confident again about sufficient revenue and
the hiring of three additional staff for registration services has been
authorised.  We have already signed a contract with a person from Turkey
who will start this month, as soon as her visa becomes available.  We
will hire two more junior hostmasters as quickly as possible drawing
from the response from our announcement in March.  This step will very
quickly more than double the staff time available for registration
services. 

Hiring and training the new staff will take some time.  This means we
will have to live with larger backlogs and increased response times for
some weeks to come.  I ask you to bear with us for a few weeks and to
show some understanding to NCC registration services staff who are
working very hard to process your requests as quickly as possible. 

We expect to see a gradual improvement during July and to be able to
return to our usual level of response times by late August. 

If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Regards

Daniel Karrenberg
RIPE NCC Manager