Let us all bend over, apply the Vaseline...

[Chris A. Icide]

It seems that Mr. Atkins is defining "small ISP" as a regional, multi-homed
ISP that under his definition would "require" thier own /19 or larger block of
IP addresses.  Now, not only does this ISP have to pay $2500 for this block,
they also must justify this block.  So lets take a napkin scratch look at this.

The regional ISP uses the CIDR block in the following manner:

# of old		Designated Use			Revenue based upon use
Class C		of IP's				of IP's

1		Regional ISP backbone		0
2		Regional ISP dynamic dialup	39,900 (450 lines * 5 * 19.95)
0.5		Regional ISP static dialup	3,000 (100 * 1 * 30.00)
2		R&D / Lab / Test Network	0
5.5		56/64k leased / frame service	3,300 (22 * 1 * 150.00)
17		T1 and higher leased/frame	17,250 (23 * 1 * 750.00)
2		Web Farm Services		40,000 (400 * 1 * 100.00)
2		Reserve/broken router buffer	0
----
32						103,450

The (X * Y * Z) stand for the following

X - Number of sales of this type of service
Y - Overbooking of lines/capacity
Z - Average revenue per sale of service

So, this "small" regional ISP, if they practice reasonable use of thier
assigned block, could (lets say I'm off in my prices by 50%) make as
much as 52,000 dollars per month from the block of IP's.  Obviously,
this ISP has other expenses including access and the such, however,
it appears that the ISP should be able to afford the extra $210 per
month cost to maintain his CIDR block.

Again, this is merely a napkin based shot at a regional ISP's revenue,
and in no way is based upon anything more than 3 minutes of my time
to throw it together.  I'm not privy to the current operating costs and
revenue streams of such organizations, and should this lead somewhere
perhaps someone who is could flesh it out some.

My goal was to try and determine what exactly a small ISP requiring a
/19 or larger CIDR block really is.  It's definately NOT a single T1 mom &
pop shop.

Also it should be noted that the above theoretical ISP doesn't have to get
a /19 CIDR from ARIN, if it receives a /19 or larger from an upstream, it
very well could use that block to maintain it's services.

I've seen quite a few CIDR blocks that are owned by Sprint being advertised
not only through Sprint, but also through MCI, UUNET, etc...

Chris