Re: PI & 1st allocation policy

[Hans Petter Holen <]

> > The current policy is that anyone qualifying for an amount of PA space
> > qualifies for the same amount of space in PI. Routing may not be
> > considered as justification for additional addresses.
>
> Which is (and I agree with Kurtis here) bad as it encourages lying to
> make the block bigger and improve routeability likeliness.

While this may or may not be true, the RIPE NCC is in no possition to
guarantee routability likeliness. Today filtering is done on prefix
length for obvious reasons - if the policy were to change to allow big
blocks for some reason other than the need for the volume of addresses - I
am quite shure we will se some other filtering coming up.

From the discussions over the last years on this topic I see that the sole
need for PI space is entities who want to be multi homed, thus beeing
independent of a single provider.

> (Of course startup LIRs could go for a suballocation first, and then
> renumber into their own allocation - but from what I hear, many people
> really really distrust their upstreams and do not WANT to do anything
> with "foreign" address space).

Often its not a matter of distrust - its a matter of the up stream
dictating your business practices. Couple years ago I had a phone call
from one of the Scandinavian regulators - he had gotten the impression
from small ISPs in his country that it was mandatory to use address space
from the upstream in order to buy transit from that particular upstream -
thus locking the ISP to a particular upstream.

While it may be some degree of trivial to renumber the internal
infrastructure of an ISP - it is close to impossible to renumber your
customers - if you do that you gvie your customers an intencive to
reevaluate their service provider, which is not something you want to do
to all your customers at once.

> > 1. Reduce the minimum allocation size from /20 to /21
>
> Fine with me.
>
> > 2. Remove the requirement to show an immediate need for 25% of the
> > allocated
> >     address space (a /23 in this case)
>
> Fine with me (see above).
>
> > 3. No longer assign PI (Portable) address space to End Users
> > 4. End Users requiring a portable address block could become an LIR and
> > receive
> >     a /21 allocation.
>
> I'm a bit worried about that.
>
> It's a useful approach as it means "end customers that want to be *so*
> independent from everybody else that they absolutely *need* to burden
> their prefix onto the whole world's routers actually have to pay a
> yearly fee to get those addresses".
>
> On the other hand, it could be seen as kind of a "cartel" that denies
> enterprises' access to the Internet or whatever (Daniel K. is the
> chief political worrier for this ;-) ) which might stir up sleeping
> dragons.

One way to solve this is to introduce a one time service fee for the
initial block - I seem to remember APNIC is doing something like this.

> (But overall I like this approach.  I would have never proposed something
> so radical myself, but I *have* come to the opinion that PI is *bad*).
>
> Ah.  One thing is missing.  What about enterprises that want address
> space that doesn't have to be routeable but *needs* to be unique (for
> internal/VPN connections, for IXP meshes, and so on)?  Do we want to
> enforce "become a LIR" on them?

How real is this case theese days ?

-hph