[ppml] Policy to help the little guys

[William Herrin]

On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 2:38 AM, David Williamson <dlw+arin at tellme.com> wrote:
>  I'd be in favor of that.  I still think there's a lot of demand for
>  multi-homed sites that have a legitimate need for PI.  Forcing small
>  multi-homed sites to lie to get PI space seems less than ideal given
>  the constraints of IPv4 availability.  If you can get a PA /24 for
>  multi-homing, and anyone can, why can't you get PI?  It's not like it's
>  going to pollute the routing table any more than the PA /24.  The only
>  "advantage" to the PA /24 is that you get stuck with one of your
>  upstreams, whether you like it or not.  I'll also note that the other
>  RIRs already have made this shift.

Hi David,

The main problem with PI assignments is the systemic cost of
announcing a BGP prefix ( http://bill.herrin.us/network/bgpcost.html
). If you look at the things from a different perspective, the problem
is the lack of mechanisms by which the 27000 active AS's can recover
the BGP cost directly from the folks announcing a prefix.

The prefix length restriction at the RIRs is a somewhat upside-down
way of assuring that few who aren't putting lots of money into the
infrastructure can consume the expensive resource. To justify a /22
you must document a fairly sizable IT operation, one whose nature will
require spending at least tens of thousands of dollars a year on
Internet transit.

Solve either variant of the BGP cost problem first (cut the cost or
figure out how to bill for it) and there'll be no reason for ARIN to
maintain a limit on minimum assignment size.

Regards,
Bill Herrin


-- 
William D. Herrin herrin at dirtside.com bill at herrin.us
3005 Crane Dr. Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
Falls Church, VA 22042-3004