Re: "Leasing" of space via non-connectivity providers

[Matthew Kaufman <matthew () matthew at>]

On 2/3/2011 9:32 AM, Scott Helms wrote:
> John,
>
>     I would hope that if some ARIN policy is enacted there would be 
> some way to differentiate between organizations, like the one I belong 
> to, that have provided this kind of service to customers for a number 
> of years and organizations looking to take advantage of the new 
> scarcity.  We have and do provide IP space for other ISPs (mainly 
> small and mid size) despite not providing connectivity for a number of 
> reasons.  We began providing this as a way of getting connectivity 
> provider independent space to ISPs that lacked their own ASN and 
> usually were not multi-homed because I had so many ISPs changing their 
> upstream provider that it was causing us issues in both our 
> engineering and call center teams.  We provide network engineering 
> (think re-IPing lots of ISP networks) and end user technical support 
> (think lots of calls from upset customer who had to change their 
> static IP) for many ISPs around the country.  We certainly don't have 
> a huge allocation, we have 209 /24s reassigned and 9 reallocated 
> currently.  We also pass along all of the usage and reporting 
> requirements that ARIN requires of us.  We also don't make money on 
> the practice we charge a small amount on an annual basis for record 
> keeping.  As I said, we started this mainly to prevent network 
> disruption and extra work _not_ as a profit center.
>
>     How a line might be drawn I don't know, but its important to 
> understand that there are very legitimate reasons to reassign or 
> reallocate space even if you are not providing connectivity for a 
> given network.

It isn't at all clear to me how your business model is different from an 
ISP that chooses to connect their customer base to the Internet by 
buying multiple transit connections that happen to terminate very close 
to the customer's CPE.

Or an ISP that has its own IP space but is letting their DSL aggregator 
announce it and provide the downstream DSL circuits to the ISP's customers.

Seems perfectly legitimate to me.

Matthew Kaufman