[arin-discuss] Policy question

[Owen DeLong]

> On Apr 25, 2019, at 20:44 , David Rodecker <dave at serverisp.com> wrote:
> 
> Is there any requirement for an ISP to allow transferring IP's in use by a customer to another ISP?

Not only is there no such requirement, there’s actually pretty strong pressure not to allow it.

It causes fragmentation of the IP routing table which is considered problematic from a router memory perspective. Less so these days than in some years past, but still an issue.

> In the telephone world, NANP requires local number portability such that a customer isn't beholden to a single carrier.

Changing phone number involves changing stationary, business cards, and all kinds of things that communicate with external parties and are hard to update.

Changing IP addresses is a pain, but if you’ve used DNS properly, it’s pretty easy to know where you need to update it and it’s not that problematic in most cases.

> Case example: Long standing customer at a data center with a /24 IP block wants to move to another datacenter.

As a general rule, number portability isn’t going to be very useful here anyway.

Unless the customer wants prolonged down time, they’re going to want to move in stages and have some equipment at the new datacenter running in parallel. That means new numbers at the new datacenter anyway because the old numbers need to keep running and cutover is (usually) best accomplished after testing by DNS changes.

Owen

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