Funding - what about the second year?

[Michael Dillon]

On Tue, 18 Feb 1997, Randy Bush wrote:

> > For starters, NSI can determine easily how many multi-homes customers they
> > have.
> 
> Send code.

Randy is the master of the succinct reply :-)

He means that it ain't so easy and would involve analyzing current 
BGP route announcements and correlating that with AS ownership and
that there is no current software tool that can do this.

Basically, the concept of "multihoming" is an operational concept and
not something determined by or known to the registries.

I am assuming that the reason Network Solutions is providing the initial
startup funding for ARIN is to alleviate this uncertainty about the
revenue stream and to ensure that the new organization gets on its feet
with a minimum of disruption to service. If this is the case then I
don't think we need to worry too much about how many ISP's join ARIN or
subscribe to ARIN's services because if there is a shortfall due to low
numbers we will know about this far enough in advance to be able to adapt
the organization to the reduced funding level that would result.

And this is all hypothetical because the latest reports on Internet growth
show that it continues to grow exponentially and there are no signs of
anything that would dampen that growth. Recent experience has shown us
that it is wiser to be prepared for rapid growth than for downsizing.

Michael Dillon                   -               Internet & ISP Consulting
Memra Software Inc.              -                  Fax: +1-250-546-3049
http://www.memra.com             -               E-mail: michael at memra.com