[ppml] Last Call for Comment: Policy Proposal 2003-13

[Member Services]

The ARIN Advisory Council voted to forward the following policy
proposal to the ARIN Board of Trustees for consideration.

This is a last call for comments on this policy proposal prior
to the ARIN Board of Trustees review. Comments received during
this period will be included with the proposal when it is presented
to the Board of Trustees for their consideration.

Please send your comments to ppml at arin.net. This last call will
expire at 23:59 EST on December 3, 2003.


Member Services
American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)


*** Last Call: Policy Proposal 2003-13: Six Month Supply of
IP Addresses ***

Proposal to allow members to choose to work on a 6-month
cycle.

After a subscriber has been a member of ARIN for one year
they may choose to request a 6 month supply of IP addresses.

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Discussion of the proposal by Michael Dillon:

This is basically intended to reduce some of the
administrative burden at both the subscriber/member and at
ARIN. It means that members can choose to have, on average,
two interactions with ARIN per year rather than 4. There is
some benefit to the community in forcing newcomers to
interact every 3 months because of the need to learn and
gain experience, but beyond the first year, we should let
people have more flexibility.

This will also allow larger members with more bureaucratic
internal processes to avoid internal address shortage
crises. I have mentioned this on the ppml list before in the
following paragraph:

Here's what I mean. If your goal was to maximize the
efficiency of address assignment, then you would eventually
reach an upper limit for every netblock beyond which you
can't improve efficiency. I'm assuming that is greater than
80% utilization. That means that when you reach 80% on your
last netblock, you have already used up all possible
addresses on previous netblocks so that you only have the
last 20% of the most recent netblock to allocate. In fact,
you probably have less than 20% because it is not possible
to assign IPv4 addresses to 100% efficiency. Assuming that
the allocation is based on 3 months of usage, i.e. 13 weeks,
this means that you have no more than 2.6 weeks supply of
addresses left when you submit your ARIN application. The .6
weeks will be used up by ARIN's 2-3 business days of
turnaround time so you will only have 2 weeks to get these
new addresses into your systems. The people who do this work
also do other planned and break-fix operational work so they
can't be expected to just drop everything and handle these
new IP addresses every time.

Timetable for implementation

I suggest that this proposal should be implemented within 30
days of a decision by a members meeting.

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