ARIN Proposal

[Charles T. Smith, Jr.]

> I believe that any ISP should get their own /19 at the outset.  Among other
> things, if you EVER multi-home you NEED IT if you want the multihoming to do
> you ANY good.

In a perfect world, I quite agree.

However, there are currently around 4,200 ISP's in the list.  Now, per
Kim, 300 or so ISP's already get their address blocks directly from the
'NIC, so for the case of round numbers, let's say there are 4000 ISP's
who are aware enough of services like the list that would qualify for
that /19.

That works out to slightly less than 2 /8's... if you pack them in as
tight as you can.  Again, in an ideal world, you'd reserve each ISP
more room than you allocated... let's say for sake of discussion, we
allocate enough space for each IS/P to have a /18... that ties up
4 /8's...or let's say we reserve a /16...  that takes us up to around
15 /8's either in use or reserved.

There appears to be that much space out there, in various reserved blocks;
if we're looking only at the here and now, it looks like there's the space
and more to do as you suggest.

If - and despite dire warnings of industry consolidation - ISP's continue
to grow at the current rates;  if another two or three thousand ISP's
startup up next year and the next year, each asking for their allocation,
at some point in the next two - five years, depending on how liberal
we are with reservations, space starts to get tight;  and the above back
of the envelope numbers do not take into account folks who already have
allocations and need more.

If it were certain that a replacement for IPv4 would be available in the
next couple years, what you suggest might be workable;  however, I've yet
to be convinced that it's good policy for every startup ISP, such as a
small 56K basement operation with 8 dialup modems being run by a high
school junior to start out with a /19...at least until there's a handle
on how long the current space must be made to last and what sort of
growth we're going to see in that time.

It may well be that a set of objective criteria can be worked out for
where it makes sense to allocate a /19;  given the number of open-ended
issues, I have trouble agreeing that it should be applied across the board
to all ISP's.