[ppml] Reserved allocation commitments

[Michael.Dillon at radianz.com]

For various technical and business reasons, my company must carefully plan 
and deploy new IP address ranges into our network. All of this work 
creates the need for lead time and this severely shortens the 3 month 
cycle prescribed by the ARIN policies. However, some of these problems 
could be mitigated by changing some aspects of the relationship between 
ARIN and a regular subscriber member, i.e. an ISP that comes back 
regularly for additional allocations.

Is there anything in the ARIN policies which would prevent ARIN staff from 
the following:

1. When issuing an allocation, reserve additional blocks (probably 
adjacent ones) to fulfill future allocations.

2. Along with the allocation, make a time-limited commitment to allocate a 
specific identifiable block of addresses at the next allocation on the 
condition that all normal rules for an allocation are met. If the time 
limit runs out, the commitment also expires. I suggest a time limit of 4 
months.

What does this achieve?

It so happens, that in our network there are ACLs in a lot of edge routers 
that need to be changed before we can begin to use a new allocation and 
this change work takes a long time to plan and execute because we severely 
restrict any interventions to routers in our network during the time 
period that our business customers are using the network. If we knew 3 
months in advance, what the new allocation would be, we could complete all 
the preparatory work before making the application for an allocation.

So, is there any policy that prohibits ARIN from making a commitment that 
is both time-limited and conditional upon meeting all normal conditions? 
The net impact of doing this would be to tie up a small amount of reserved 
IP space for 3-4 months. The amount of IP space affected would be 
approximately 25% of ARIN's yearly allocations.

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Michael Dillon
Capacity Planning, Prescot St., London, UK
Mobile: +44 7900 823 672    Internet: michael.dillon at radianz.com
Phone: +44 20 7650 9493    Fax: +44 20 7650 9030