[ppml] Suggestion for ARIN to deligate smaller IP blocks

[David E. Smith]

Jon Lewis wrote:

> The flaw there is any router that supports BGP can be used by an end-user 
> network to multihome.  Nobody says they have to take more than default 
> routes from each provider.  There is no "cost of full BGP router" barrier 
> to entry.

Even if there were, the cost is trivial. I'm running my network (a /19
with full BGP feed) on a $500 PC. And the only reason it cost that much
is because the boss wanted something rack-mountable.

Anyway, a tangent.

My company used to have a /20, but we got to about 80% utilization on
that, and I asked for a bit more space (I think I requested an
additional /22). I asked for the space I knew I'd need in the next year
or so, per the guidelines. ARIN gave me a second /20, quite a bit larger
than what I requested.

There's a bit of convenience to it, in that they gave me a /20 adjacent
to my previous one, so I can aggregate the announcements and only
advertise a single /19. Assuming my company keeps growing, the space
will eventually get used (though it may be a couple more years). I
assume I was given this specific additional allocation because it was
adjacent, and to keep me to a meager one BGP announcement.

In the meantime, though, I've got a couple thousand IPs that I'm not
(presently) using.

Is it better to have folks like me potentially sitting on address space
that someone else could be using now? Or is it better to try to keep the
global routing table from ballooning even more?

David Smith
MVN.net