I also support this proposal. Being at the "receiving end" of an ISP, we've seen customer requirements often enough - many times we have been able to redirect the customer wishes towards regular PA space (which of course we'd rather assign, as it keeps customer "in line" more than PI), but larger places often have gone through IP renumbering before (sometimes when switching to us), so they know the cost involved. The prospect of e.g. shelling out the time & money for renumbering again is not very appealing. Of course, those bigger places often require more than a /24, so the issue of non-routable PIs doesn't necessarily apply. Anyway, there are situations where the number of IPs involved is smaller, but the implications are a lot bigger - best example is the current PI I had been asked to request - while the usage is somewhere in the 90 area (totalling in at or around /25+/26 given the network structure and organization), RIPE proposed assigning a /26+/27 which is (of course) useless. While the number of currently used IPs would not necessarily warant a /24 due to rather low work changing THOSE IPs, they are currently in the first roll-out phase of POS terminals - boxes, which have the destination for their communication hard-coded in Flash. Of course chaging one is possible, but imagine doing that on several tenthousands of the boxes at some point ... you will understand that the cost involved is not paid from pocket change ... my mistake was not artificially blowing up the requirements in order to end up in the 230-250 IPs range but attaching a correct, real IP plan ... :( Dmitry Kiselev wrote:
On my practice multihoming PI users ask one more prefix each time the previous one exhausted. Its coused by difficults while receiving one large enough PI subnet. Instead of becoming LIR and have no problems with PA, such users save money and got a couple of small PIs for a space solution... Yeah, here, in xUSSR, it is common practice. :(
What's the point in making end users (as in Companies, etc.) register as an LIR just because they want (or need) a network of their own? The main reason is not being dependent of a single provider, being able to switch providers when technically necessary without a sh@tload of problems and quite non-trivial cost issues afterwards due to changes in IP addresses ... being an LIR is pointless for non-ISPs or SMBs (and most likely for large ones, too). Erich Hohermuth wrote:
increase the prefixes. If someone ask for multihoming with PI Space, it makes sense that we assign a size which will work with the current filtering policies. But maybe we have to change the policy about PI Space in general ? The question is, which "problems" do we rate as a higher risk; waste of ip space, amount of prefixes, reach ability of a subnet. What do you think ?
Multihoming as such I don't see as the core reason for PI space - assigning PA space by two providers isn't a problem, less so than announcing the same size PI prefix, as there should always be a less-specific /19 or bigger to fall back to ... If the amount of prefixes were a reason, shouldn't ISPs be (en)forced to aggregate their announcements? Looking at e.g. the peering tables I get at DECIX or via our uplinks, I see hundreds and thousands of subnets announced by providers from their own PA space, broken down into _many_ subnets, additionally to the aggregated prefix. And I don't think all (or even a mentionable percentage of) those customers are multi-homed and therefore require the smaller announcement be made due to more-specific routing ... at that point, possibly 25% of the routing tables could be saved ... Rather, in order to discourage PI usage by endusers who don't actually need a PI network from a technical standpoint, why not charge an appropriate amount for assigning PI networks? Please correct me if I got this wrong, but at the moment, PI networks count towards the LIR's rating. Which can end up - in a way - to be unfair, as PI networks are requested for end customer, which may at some point in the future switch providers. The points are still counted, even though the provider does not have any revenue to count against it. By defining a rate of €X per /24 would one on hand reduce the requested size of the requests, and also make users think twice about requesting technically unnecessary PI space ... Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com wrote:
If the organization is simultaneously applying for an AS number or the organization already has an AS number, then we should consider routing to be a major issue if the organization says that it is. After all, the only purpose of having an AS number is to do routing.
Indeed. Still, an AS should not be a prerequisite though, as using an PI could be the first part of setting up "advanced routing". Regards, -garry