[ppml] How transitive is utilization?

[Michael.Dillon at radianz.com]

>> If you've assigned >=80% of your IP space to customers or
>> internal use and can justify the assignments, you qualify for another
>> assignment.

>Not quite.  If you get a /23 (to make numbers easier) and allocate
>4 customers /25's, but each customer only needed 4 IP's your not
>going to pass ARIN's muster, even though you've "assigned" > 80%
>of your IP space.  The rules are transitive, and apply down stream
>as well.  If you assign IP's to a customer, they must also meet the
>80% rule.

Does that mean that if you give those three /25s to a customer and they 
have them 80% utilized, you can now count these blocks as 100% utilized? 
Or do you have to audit customer utilization every time you do an ARIN 
application?

>Again, I'm not suggesting this is a major issue.  For small allocations
>like these the company with 7 devices is quietly encouraged by the
>ISP to check off a box that says "14 IP's", since the block below
>it was "6 IP's."  The ISP puts in the records submitted to ARIN
>customer wanted 14, gave them a /28, all is happy.

If this is acceptable then we should document it and put it in the policy. 
It shouldn't be necessary for ARIN members to sneak around and fiddle 
their IP address accounts in order to run their business.

>I point this out only because people toss out that meeting 80% is
>"trivial", and while for most larger ISP's dealing with a diverse
>customer base this is true,

Even large diverse ISPs are supposed to come back to ARIN several times 
per year for a 3 month supply of IP addresses so it is entirely possible 
that the analysis of the LAST ALLOCATED NETBLOCK could run into the same 
corner cases that other people struggle with.

In any case, it is not ARIN's business to have policies which penalize 
smaller companies. That kind of thing would be anti-competitive and 
definitely would not be tenable in the courts. That's why we need to clean 
up ARIN's current policies.

--Michael Dillon