[arin-discuss] Question regarding 4.2.1.6 - Immediate need

[Steve Bertrand]

Hi everyone,

I'm peering with a local company here in town. This company has their
own AS number, but it's IP space from an upstream provider. They
advertise this IP space back to their upstream via their own ASN.

The current IP address space used is < /23 (a /24 and a /26).

One of the company's clients is an ISP (a WISP), who has been running
their network under 1918 space for years using multiple levels of NAT.

There is no need to describe why this is just plain bad, and all of the
things it breaks.

This company's WISP client has approx 386 access clients, 104 APs, and a
few servers. They desire to renumber all of the WAN interfaces of the
CPE with a single IP and NAT the internal side of the client premise
gear, and have public IPs on their infrastructure gear with public IP
addresses.

Personally, I believe that this falls under:

4.2.1.6. Immediate need

If an ISP has an immediate need for address space, and can provide
justification to show that the address space will be utilized within 30
days of the request, ARIN may issue a block of address space, not larger
than a /16 nor smaller than ARIN's customary minimum allocation, to that
organization. These cases are exceptional.

However, I don't know if the immediate need is for your OWN use, or if
the case I've described (ISP assigning IP space to another ISP for their
clients) falls under this 'exceptional case'.

My expectation would be that the company's client would have to justify
it's need to the upstream in the exact same fashion that I would if I
was going back directly to ARIN, but if everything is NAT'd, that may be
a bit difficult to do (perhaps copies of client agreements to prove the
numbers).

Note that I am not trying to perform any form of justification for this
company, I'd just like to know if:

a) 4.2.1.6 outweighs the efficient use of a /23
b) if a case like this is exceptional enough to fit 4.2.1.6

With the proper justification, the company could receive a /23 from it's
upstream (or myself) to renumber this one client, which in turn would
allow them to meet ARINs /23 criteria, but that would have their client
renumber their entire network twice within 30 days.

Feedback and insight welcome ;)

Cheers!

Steve