[ppml] Draft 2 of proposal for ip assignment with sponsorship

[william at elan.net]

I have not missed this point, in fact I already made a draft available in 
separate email to this list for proposal that would require ARIN to make 
micro-assignments from specific class-A and in fact to try to keep size of 
assignments about the same for each /8 ARIN has and make information about
this size of smallest announement for each /8 publicly available (to be 
fair they already provide this information on website even now). I also 
argued before against what are otherwise fairly good proposals 2002-5 and 
2002-6 on the grounds that they do not include provision that when changing
to smaller size block then /20 ISPs must get allocated space from /8 block
here other micro-allocations are also being made and where ISPs do not 
filter it on /20 boundary. 

In addition I have to point out again that both APNIC and RIPE are making 
assignments smaller then /20 out of their blocks which seems to indicate 
a support of this among majority of RIRs. And this also means no matter 
how we look at it, smaller announcements would still dominate routing 
table if the grows of internet in the countries that represent 90% of the 
World population continues.

And as far as load on the routers we have Moor's law that says that they 
would become twice as fast every two years, the grows of the routing table 
as seen at http://www.employees.org/~tbates/cidr.plot.html is a lot smaller
and everything does indicate that routers are becoming faster and smarter
and more capable and new technologies are also being invented that help to 
deal with more complex routing table.

> >  routing table: Multihoming organizations are already announcing part
> >           of their upstream's block as separate BGP announcement. Having
> >           them announce their own block would not change size of the
> >           routing table, but good provisions must be put to check that
> >           those requesting micro-assignments are indeed multihomed.
> >           Relying on them just having an ASN without futher verification
> >           may not be enough.
> 
> But there is one key point that you have missed (and many people have 
> missed).  While the number of prefixes may not change, the structure of the 
> table will change.  Right now, a /24 out of one of UUnet's /14s is part of 
> a larger aggregate.  If this UUnet customer has his own /24 this is not 
> part of a larger aggregate.
> 
> What is the impact of this?  Well, with today's routing table and routers 
> nothing.  However, history has prooven that it is sometimes necessary to 
> not accept all announcements, and the easiest way to deal with this is to 
> filter on RIR allocation boundaries.  If we move forward with having ARIN 
> allocate /24s then we are tying the hands of the backbones that we all 
> depend on.  Making these microallocations out of a separate block would 
> help mitigate the issue, but there would still be far more prefixes out 
> there that are not part of smaller aggregates, which is the fundamental 
> issue here as I see it.
> 
> As I have said in the past, there are so many new mistakes we can make, why 
> must we insist on making the same ones again?
> 
> Alec
> 
> --
> Alec H. Peterson -- ahp at hilander.com
> Chief Technology Officer
> Catbird Networks, http://www.catbird.com
>