Last Call for Comment: Policy Proposal 2001-2

[Trevor Paquette]

By adopting this policy I think the following points should be made:

1) IPv4 exhaustion
   v4 space will be used at a higher rate, with an increase of wasted space.
   More and more companies are beginning to rely on the internet to conduct
   their day to day business operations (Raise your hand if you've heard
   complaints from customers when email is not delivered within 5 minutes
   after they hit 'send'). As such, these companies will begin to look at
   providing their own redundant links to the Internet (via multi-homing)
   and not depend on the redundancy of their upstream provider. This 'always
   connected' (vs 'always on') requirement will increase IP requests to
   upstream providers.

2) Potential for abuse of the policy to secure IP space.
   I can see companies begin to abuse Policy 2001-2 to secure a /24
   and use very little address space out of that block. Some companies will
   lie about being or becoming multi-homed in order to secure more IP space
   then they really need.

   In today's world, revenue is king. If I have to tell a customer because
   they are no longer multi-homed (or they lied about it), that I have to
   pull their IP space; and they threaten to terminate their service with
   us; guess who is going to win. The customer. Very few Senior Executives
   understand or care about IP Policy; their job is to make the company
   money, keep the revenues flowing. If that means the customer gets to
   keep their /24; so be it.

3) The current AS limit.
   As a few folks have mentioned before that AS numbers are a much scarcer
   commodity then IP space. I agree with that statement. Policy 2001-2 will
   make the AS space run out faster. (Do we need to propose an new policy
   or an RFC on increasing AS size?)

4) Reclaimation
   How does an ISP reclaim the IP space (here comes the key phrase) "without
   losing that customer", should the customer decide one day that they no
   longer want to be multi-homed? Is it up to the ISP that gave the IP space
   in the first place to periodically check to make sure that the customer is
   in fact still multi-homed? (which brings up point 2 again)
   
Remember, I'm not saying that these points will happen. I'm saying that these
are very possible scenarios.

My apologies if this has been discussed before; I was in Nassau during the
hurricane (very little Internet access in Nassau, even more so during the
storm and the days following it) and I just got home to start catching up on
things.

Trev
--

Trevor Paquette          |TeraGo Networks Inc.  |Work:(403)668-5321
Trevor.Paquette at TeraGo.ca|300, 300 Manning Rd NE|Cell:(403)703-8738
Lead Systems Architect   |Calgary, AB, Canada   |Main:(403)668-5300
http://www.terago.ca     |       T2E 4K8        | Fax:(403)668-5344