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

[Leo Bicknell]

In a message written on Wed, Sep 24, 2003 at 04:27:22PM +0200, Mark ELkins wrote:
> I'm in the fortunate position of having some historical allocations.
> When it came to assisting some of the ISP's downstream of me with their own 
> allocations - so they could Multihome - life was not easy. The process took 
> months.  I assisted with two sites, one in Namibia and one in Lesotho. This 
> is not just a South African thing but very much an African thing and very 
> much needed. I can see a number of ISP's in Swaziland who will benefit.

Let me ask a different, but related, question.

Who gets to multihome?

For this argument I'll take as fact that allocations (or lack of)
decided who can or cannot multihome.  What set of people, globally,
get to multihome?

Why does an African ISP with an E1 and 1000 subscribers get to
multihome, yet E-Bay with several gigabits of traffic and millions
of users not?

Why does an African ISP with an E1 and 1000 subcribers get to
multihome, but a US ISP with a DS-3 and 10000 subscribers not?

When a US ISP the same size as an African ISP comes to ARIN after
this has passed and claims that if an African ISP of his size can
multi-home, what argument are we going to use to tell him no?  You
have it too easy already because you have cheap bandwidth?  That
doesn't sound like a good answer.

Who gets to multihome?

Are we changing the requirement from the technical (number of users)
to the political (the poor and disadvantaged get extra help)?  That
seems to be a pretty fundamental change to me.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request at tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org
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