Re: BGP announcements and small providers

[Karl Denninger <karl () Mcs Net>]

> 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

You're right.

And as soon as the mainstream hardware we all sell to people, and that has
significant market penetration in the installed base, makes this reasonable
to do for a *large* operation, this will be reasonable.

However, as the state of IPV4 and its hardware sits right now, it is NOT
reasonable to do *other than on the boundaries of a customer's individual
decision*.

That is, if a PROVIDER changes upstream links, it is unreasonable to expect
their *customers* to renumber.  To force that paradigm is to attempt to
tie an ISP to a given provider. The requirement to renumber comes out of the
blue, it is an unanticipated cost, and one which is neither under the
control of nor a result of the actions of the customer.

Better go talk to some attorneys before you do things that lead to this
result.  

If a *customer* changes providers, they bear the costs of their actions.
If the operative cause of their renumbering is their decision to leave one
ISP and go to another, *they* are directly responsible for their own pain.

THAT is much more likely to pass muster.

--
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