[ppml] RIR Shopping, Table Growth x5?

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> If you're a global company though, it would seem the current 
> policies in all of the regions lead us down a path to 5 
> prefixes per ASN.
> That is, each company would get a prefix from each RIR.

As far as I am aware, there is no policy which requires a global network
operator to get addresses from each of the regions where their network
has a footprint. While some global network operators do indeed get
blocks from multiple RIRs, others do not.

My company operates a global network and we decided to get all our
addresses worldwide from ARIN. At the time, the corporate head office
was in the USA but that was a minor factor in the decision. We already
had some ARIN addresses from an acquisition back in the early days of
the Internet and it seemed easier to manage just one RIR relationship. 

The two major factors in dealing with only one RIR was that our network
design was a central function (although the people sat outside the ARIN
region) and that we did not want to deal with the internal route
explosion (and related complexity) that Leo mentioned.

Should there be a policy external to our company that required us to
choose one way or the other?

I don't think so. At this point in time, companies are free to follow
the path that we did or the path that VSNL Teleglobe did based on their
own internal technical, operational or management needs. This is a good
thing even if it does allow some companies to do RIR shopping. I am not
aware of any negative effects of RIR shopping that would justify a
restrictive policy in this area.

--Michael Dillon