[ppml] Policy to help the little guys

[Jon Lewis]

On Wed, 19 Mar 2008, Jo Rhett wrote:

> On Mar 19, 2008, at 3:27 PM, William Herrin wrote:
>>
>> 1. ARIN takes a /16 and lets it be known that only /25 or longer PI
>> prefixes will be assigned from this /16 (nothing /24 or shorter).
>> .....
>> 5. Each year, ARIN solicits bids for an ISP to serve as a "catchall"
>> tunnel broker for the whole /16. The tunnel broker announces the whole
>> /16 and (if you pay him) then tunnels any traffic to you via GRE in
>
> FYI I see nothing about this proposal that requires ARIN.  It could
> be implemented by any current or future holder of /16 or whatever
> size space.  It sounds like an ingenious marketing opportunity that
> if implemented in advance could become really valuable when IPv4
> exhaustion occurs.   Why don't you do this?

AFAIK, there have been companies doing this sort of business model for 
years.  I suspect the typical customer is a "power user" who can't get 
static IP on their home connection for reasonable $ or at all.

I'm not sure I can see businesses relying on such a service...due to the 
added latency and the fact that you're then relying on all your 
traffic crossing "the internet" multiple times to get to you.  Unlike 
directly connecting to a provider, you have little control over 
reachability or QoS between your network and your IP space provider.

Maybe as IPv4 becomes scarce, some legacy /16 holders will step forward 
and offer this...and because they just can't reasonably get IPs otherwise, 
businesses will have little choice but to accept such a model if they want 
more v4 IPs.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
  Jon Lewis                   |  I route
  Senior Network Engineer     |  therefore you are
  Atlantic Net                |
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