[ARIN-consult] [ARIN-Suggestions] New Suggestion - ACSP 2016.4 - Waiting List for 2 Byte ASNs

[Job Snijders]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 10:12:16PM -0700, Owen DeLong wrote:
> Actually, the community thing is largely a red herring in lieu of
> “convenience”.
> 
> There are perfectly valid ways to address the community functionality
> desired using 4-byte ASNs.

This is news to me. Can you back this claim up by providing references
to both the appropiate standardization and the publically known
deployment of such standards?

Some of my own digging: If I look at NTT's BGP Community scheme at
http://www.us.ntt.net/support/policy/routing.cfm#communities under the
"Customers wanting to alter their route announcements to selected
peers." section - you can easily conclude that 16-bit ASNs are
first-class citizens, but 32-bit ASNs don't even fit the scheme. This
pattern seems to be employed by other significant networks such as
Level3 (http://onestep.net/communities/as3356/), GTT
(http://onestep.net/communities/as3257/) or for example Comcast
(http://onestep.net/communities/as7922/)

I won't pass value judgement on the design of these schemes, they are
what they are. I want to stipulate that in my opinion the "community
thing" is not a "red herring", but that there is a tangible difference
between 16-bit and 32-bit ASNs in today's BGP landscape.

I think the waiting list idea is worth considering.

Kind regards,

Job