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

[Owen DeLong]

While I agree with almost all of your statements below, especially points
1, 4, and 5 (I don't know what 2 was supposed to be, it was omitted), I
am not in a position to judge 3 (I suspect it is true, but I just don't have
any way to know for sure), and, I must disagree with 6.

In your point 6, you make a logical valid argument.  Unfortunately, I don't
think it reflects the political reality of what has happened in the past
within ARIN.  Instead, if 2003-15 passes, it will be used as a justification
to not implement 2002-3 because "It's not as important in North America and
we made the exception Africa needed." or something close to that.

I hope you can understand that is why I will support 2002-3 regardless, but,
I will favor amending 2002-3 to include micro-allocations.  I will only
support 2003-15 if it is amended to make it apply to all of ARIN region
and not just Africa.  Local policy exceptions produce a very bad precedent
and are counter-productive in the long run.  Especially when the exception
they make is needed as an amendment to policy everywhere.

Owen


--On Friday, September 26, 2003 12:00 AM +0200 Eyal Tevet 
<eyal at connectit.co.za> wrote:

> Hi, as the network administrator of a medium to large ISP within South
> Africa I have
> experience these difficulties with multi-homing.  Although you are correct
> that it is not
> impossible to multi-home without being in the posession of a portable
> block when you
> have 1/2/3 allocations of /24 blocks, doing so when you have maybe 5 or 6
> /26 and
> /25 allocations is effectively impossible. This is largely because most
> larger ISP's
> (even in South Africa) will ignore any advertisements smaller than /24.
>
> At the same time, if you do find the need to change upstream providers,
> renumbering out
> of, say, two to three /24's worth of address space that have been
> reassigned to clients
> as /30 blocks is not a simple operation. (Yes, due to the limited address
> space our policy
> is to assign exactly /30 blocks to fixed line clients)
>
> As for supporting proposal 2002-3 with ammendment to support both
> micro-assignments
> and micro-allocations, I am 100% behind it.  However, I do believe that
> there is just cause
> in passing 2003-15 regardless, on grounds that:
> 1. There is a genuine need for it (both economic and scale)
> 3. It is unanimously supported within it's region
> 4. It would promote the internet industry within that region
> 5. This would increase the number of ARIN members
> 6. The routing table impact assessment resulting from the implementation
> of 2003-15 would
> be invaluable to the support of 2002-3
>
> That looks like a win win to me
>
> Regards
> Eyal Tevet
> Connect IT / NetraLINK
> www.netralink.com
> 0860-223-638
>