[ARIN-consult] Fee restructuring

[Owen DeLong]

On Oct 27, 2012, at 6:40 AM, Jimmy Hess <mysidia at gmail.com> wrote:

> It's interesting the change in language "Registration Services
> Subscription Plan (RSSP) provides Internet service providers of all
> types (ISP, hosting companies, etc.) "
> 
> So hosting companies will  be ISPs now, instead of End users,  even
> when they assign IP addresses to their own network and devices?
> 
> 
> On 10/27/12, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
>> On Oct 26, 2012, at 2:48 PM, Jo Rhett <jrhett at netconsonance.com> wrote:
>>> On Oct 26, 2012, at 7:18 AM, Andrew Dul - andrew.dul wrote:
>>>> On 2012-10-25 14:35, Owen DeLong wrote:
>>>>> This fee restructuring places a number of incentives in the exactly
> ....
>>>> In general, I support the new fee schedule.  There is one area which I
> ...
>>> 
>>> First, I don't believe that $300 is any significant amount of money to any
>>> operating business, profit or non-profit. I do believe that individuals
>> 
>> You are, in fact, incorrect about the first half of that statement.
> 
> I don't believe he's incorrect about that.  The significance of
> maintenance of IP address resources at  $300 for an end user or any
> other price,  is to be compared  to other costs of maintaining the
> network of the size those resources are assigned to;  including shared
> and per-device costs;  including capital expenses,   and including
> operational expenses and labor costs required to install, maintain,
> repair those devices,  implement the network,  and  daily costs of any
> staff or people the organization has using the devices to accomplish
> tasks.

I know of a number of community networks and other non-profit end-users
for whom $100 is a burden they meet through the largess of a handful
of their members donating to cover the ARIN fees each year. It is far
from certain that they would be able to depend on tripling (or more)
that largess and it would definitely not be an insignificant additional
burden for them.


> Try "$300 is not a significant amount of money compared to other
> capital and operating costs for an operating organization,  who has
> purchased and has to maintain all the hardware required to need an RIR
> end user allocation"
> 

That is an entirely different statement, but, it's also not a statement
which is inherently true. Many of these organizations operate on
donated equipment and shoestring budgets.

> Since the end user allocates start at a /22; approximately averages
> $0.30 per IP address,  and maintaining anything close to computers and
> network devices requiring 1000 IPs annually  is otherwise so costly,
> that $300  won't likely be a significant percentage of the
> maintenance.

Actually, no, end-user allocations start at /24 and maintaining a
public access community network that requires 1,000 IPs can be done
using donated hardware and labor such that $300 is, in fact, more than
90% of the annual operating budget.

> The electricity cost alone is likely $8 -  $15 / year per host device
> that is a computer,    assuming  30W usage, powered on  4 hours a day;
> in actuality, if devices are powered on that infrequently,  the
> number of devices supported by a DHCP pool with that many IPs should
> be much larger    than 1000,   so you could double the electricity
> cost per IP from that,   except that some of those IPs  may  be
> low-power devices  such as  smart phones.

Many of these networks don't have more than one computer host device
and are located such that the electricity (and real estate) is basically
donated. It's a lot easier to find donations of small amounts of space
and electricity than cash.

> So if the annual electricity cost per node averages $8;  that puts
> the  $0.30 IP allocation  cost per node at  a measly  3.7%.

You are assuming that a community network operates all of the IP-using
nodes on its network. Obviously this is not a correct assumption in
such a case.

> And you haven't started to calculate the costs of labor; the
> staff/person using the node during that time.

When the labor is donated and the staff are volunteers, those are
pretty low costs.

> Networks typically require repair of nodes,  when hardware and
> software components fail;  human efforts to maintain and administer
> nodes,  including software maintenance cost,  to keep nodes updated
> and supported.

I'm very much aware of all of these things. I'm also aware of the fact
that when you assume that all ARIN entities are businesses and ignore
community-service minded organizations doing things for motivations
other than making money, you come to conclusions like the ones above.

Since I happen to believe that such organizations are useful and
beneficial to the communities that they serve, I prefer not to encode
such assumptions into ARIN fees or policies.

Owen