[arin-ppml] Micro-allocation policy proposal draft

[Bill Woodcock]

> - increase the reserve pool to a /15
> - increase the minimum allocation for an IXP to a /22

Quadrupling the allocation while doubling the pool halves the number of IXPs served, and I think it would be unfortunate and short-sighted to let that happen.

To inject some facts into the debate:

http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/science-and-technology/internet-traffic-exchange_5k918gpt130q-en#page78

That graph is from 2011, when there were five IXPs with more than 255 participants.  

https://prefix.pch.net/applications/ixpdir/?new=1&show_inactive=1&sort=Participants&order=desc

Today, three years later, there are six IXPs with more than 255 participants. So the portion of IXPs with more than 255 participants is holding steady at 1.5%.  In 2011, there were no IXPs with more than 512 participants, and today, there’s one such, but it took sixteen years to get to that point.

There’s a case to be made that a /24 will serve 98.5% of the IXP population, and that we shouldn’t be making policy tailored for the one quarter of one percent of the IXP population that needs a /22.  On the other hand, IXPs will grow.  I think caution dictates reserving a larger pool, but I don’t know that it makes sense to give _everyone_ allocations that meet their best-case sixteen-year growth projections.

I support doubling the size of the reserved pool to a /15, but I don’t think increasing the initial allocation size beyond a /24 is warranted yet.  I think sparse allocation is a sensible policy.  We can be reasonably certain that there will be at least 512 more IXPs before people stop caring about IPv4, but it’s far from a sure bet that _any_ of those would grow beyond a /23 in that time.

                                -Bill




-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 841 bytes
Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail
URL: <https://lists.arin.net/pipermail/arin-ppml/attachments/20140930/b3e323fa/attachment.sig>