[arin-ppml] Justifying an ISP /22

[Serge Paquin]

Scott,

To be honest I hadn't thought of it.  Since before being an ARIN member I was not familiar at all with the policy creation process.  Once an ARIN member I've stayed on the discuss list to try and get familiar, but hadn't really thought about the process until the current thread.

As for the transfer market to be honest I don't know what the market price is.  Doing a quick search it seems to be $10 to $20 per IP so no I don't think I would want to drop $22k on IP space as a small startup.  Heck that's more than the biggest ISP's in the world pay for all their IP space.  That is not a long term investment (in theory) as IPv6 adoption grows.

My first thought would be having a /24 allocation min rather than /22, but issuing on /22 boundaries so as a member grew you could issue them the adjacent space while not increasing the BGP table size.

Once confirming their legal entity as well as the Upstream ASN they will BGP Peer with a /24 should be relatively straight forward to get.

I realize that there are likely other factors which I'm not aware of which could make my suggestion problematic.

The issue with the current system is that at the start your destiny is strongly tied to the whim of your upstream and how much IP space they will give you and what they will potentially charge for it.  As well you have to plan from the start on an IP renumbering for your installed client base which is disruptive internally and to your customers.

The barrier to entry for new companies I don't believe should be so high.  It seems to be a system to discourage ARIN membership and have small ISP's / Datacenters get their IP space directly from their upstream ISP which potentially reduces redundancy (Multi-homing) as well locks the company into a single upstream which can then dictate price since they own the IP space.

Serge.

-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Leibrand [mailto:scottleibrand at gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2013 8:44 PM
To: Serge Paquin; ARIN-PPML List
Subject: Justifying an ISP /22

(Moving this over to a new thread on PPML to discuss the policy aspects...)

Serge,

Do you have any other ideas for how to justify that an ISP really needs a /22 from the free pool, that would be easier than getting PA, using it, and then remembering? 

Or, let's say you could get a /22 from the transfer market with minimal justification (just that you're an actual network operator, say). Would it have been worth your while to pay market price for the addresses and avoid the application and renumbering hassles?

Scott

On Apr 16, 2013, at 4:36 PM, "Serge  Paquin" <serge at skycomp.ca> wrote:

> As for the Barrier to Entry; I don't believe it is the fees so much (The fee was not our issue at all) as the very hard time to justify the initial /22 allocation. Until you already have space swiped to you from your ISP and in production you can't get a direct assignment since you can't prove need.
> 
> Then when you get your allocation you have a timeframe to renumber your now production clients into the new space and hand back your ISP allocated space.
> 
> We did this a couple years ago and it was a major undertaking in additional costs of staff, tech support and scheduling to work with each client to renumber.
> 
> It was a business decision that we'd be a more stable and healthy company having our own IP space and set forth with that goal in mind and accepted the cost but it was a lot more than the ARIN fees.
> 
> I do have to say that the ARIN support staff were helpful and we had no issues dealing with them.  We just had to meet all the criteria before they could issue us a direct allocation of course.
> 
> Serge.
>