[ppml] Policy Proposal 2003-15: IPv4 Allocation Policy for the Africa Portion of the ARIN Region

[Gregory Massel]

Alec wrote:
> I am curious, why are African ISPs unable to obtain sufficient address
> space from their upstream providers?  Is the issue that such upstreams
> don't themselves qualify under ARIN's current policies?

The scale of African ISPs is significantly smaller than that of North
American ISPs. Consequently, many African ISPs have a requirement to
multi-home at point where they are using much less address space than North
American ISPs. The need to multi-home for additional redundancy is also
significantly greater with reliance on satellite and microwave technology
and theft of and damage to terrestrial cables.

Often upstreams of African ISPs are North American or European ISPs. In
these cases, using the upstream's address space makes multi-homing tricky
and tends to restrict us to relying on using a single international
satellite link or submarine circuit (where available) for global
connectivity.

William wrote:
> Reason for 196/8 is because this ip block currently has enough free space
> (9227 /24 blocks allocated - 14%, 56309 /24 ip blocks not allocated - 85%)
> for Africa and of the allocation 14% of the blocks, about 1/3 are already
> for organizations in Africa - largest portion of African allocations then
> any other ip block ARIN has. Do note that currently IANA identifies 196/8
> as "Various Registries - Early Internic Registrations" which generally
> means ARIN is not allowed to make current registrations out of it (but I
> have in fact seen new registrations as close as 2001 made to africa out of
> this ip block), ARIN should oficially request IANA to change it and
> identify to IANA that it will be making new allocations out of this ip
> block for African portion of the net.

Approximately 70% of IP prefixes announced by South African ISPs fall within
196.0.0.0/8.

192.96.0.0/16 was assigned to the Uninet Project around 1991 and
sub-allocated to various organisations in the following years; consequently,
this is also quite widely used by organisations who received address space
in the early 90's.

The exceptions to these two blocks tend to be historical assignments of
Class B addresses made prior to the introduction of CIDR and IPs assigned by
North American or European upstreams to South African customers.

One can view a South African routing table by telnetting to
public-route-server.is.co.za and issuing the command "show ip bgp". There
are only around 650 prefixes.

Gregory Massel
Co-chairman: ISPA (South Africa)
http://www.ispa.org.za/