Re: BGP announcements and small providers

[Paul Ferguson <pferguso () cisco com>]

At 06:17 PM 2/25/97 -0700, Chris Phillips wrote:

> We service hundreds of dedicated customers and some customers don't mind
> renumbering (if they are small) but most of our larger customers who have
> more than 100-200 hosts on their network have expressed GREAT opposition to
> any such notion of renumbering. Its not that they don't want to do it
> because they are lazy, on the contrary, many companies cannot the afford the
> downtime or cost asociated with renumbering their LAN/WAN. I agree that
> renumbering is an important aspect of address grooming for better agregation
> but there are some real $$$ costs to some end-user networks to do so. Also,
> how many times can you ask a customer to renumber before they bail and go
> elsewhere?

It's been suggested that renumbering is a fact of life; everyone will
do it at least once in their lifetime. This is one of the reasons why
an entire working group in the IETF has been created to deal with this
from an operational perspective. See:

  http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/pier-charter.html

and

 http://www.isi.edu:80/div7/pier/

See also RFC2071.

- paul

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