Re: ARIN IP allocation questionn

[Joel Baker <lucifer () lightbearer com>]

On Thu, Jun 27, 2002 at 01:56:26AM -0700, David Schwartz wrote:
> > My *personal* opinion is that wise ISPs only punt customers to ARIN once
> > they reach the point where they can, in fact, have a normal ARIN netblock
> > assigned directly to them (currently a /20, unless I slept through another
> > change...)
>
>  The guidelines have a strong preference for singly-homed networks to
> use IP address space allocated to them from their upstreams. I can think
> of no logical reason* an ISP would prefer their customers to go to ARIN
> rather than deal with them. The global routing table is better off for it
> as well, as the customer's /20 would be a new route, rather than being
> included in their provider's presumably larger block.

The assumption that the ISP has a larger block is not always a wise one
to make.

>  On the other hand, I can think of many reasons a customer would prefer
> to deal with ARIN than their upstream, assuming the meager cost wasn't a
> factor and they don't mind polluting the global table a tad. Of course,
> that's not really an operational issue.

Most of the places I've worked would be charging them for the IP usage
either way, since the ISP has to pay ARIN, eventually...

>  DS
>
>  * The only reason I could possibly think of is if the ISP is afraid that
> the large allocation will impact their future allocations because they
> don't have the confidence or competence to extract a proper justification
> from their customer and present/defend that justification to ARIN when
> their next allocation comes up. But this wasn't the reason you were
> thinking of, right?

See above. Sometimes you have lots of IP space, but nothing *large*, due to
business constraints. This often changes over time, but some of us don't
have multiple legacy /16s from Back In The Day (and then again, some of us
do - but not the 'us' I work for, anymore).

Not under NDA, since all of it can be found by asking ARIN, of course. :)
-- 
***************************************************************************
Joel Baker                           System Administrator - lightbearer.com
lucifer () lightbearer com              http://users.lightbearer.com/lucifer/