* Wilfried Woeber
...and, depending on what the distribution of customer assignments across the overall address space looks like, you may be able to use the suballocation mechanism.
Admittedly, I have never used that or did any in-depth analysis of the possibilities. Just a hint to maybe also look at. I may be fully off-track, too.
I think both you and Elvis are spot-on. There are even more options than the three already mentioned... 4) If the assignments in question are made to the new spun off company's own infrastructure (which may include separate end-users or customers if they're single-address such as the DHCP pool of a broadband ISP, cf. ripe-606 section 6.2), then the old company/LIR may simply delegate the blocks to the new company by registering completely standard ASSIGNED PA inetnums. In this case there are no minimum size limits to worry about (sub-allocations are limited at /24, transfers at /22 as Elvis noted). 5) In the case that #4 doesn't work because the customers of the new company have specific (non-pooled) assignments, the new company could simply contract the old company to provide the registry services directly for them. In other words that the old company will continue to maintain the assignments in the database for each individual (non-pooled) customer of the new company. This option would obviously require a tight working relationship between the new and old companies, as every time the new company lands a new customer, they the old company must register the associated assignment. Those two options, as well as the sub-allocation option, have the added benefit that they're cheaper for the new company, as it doesn't have to become an LIR on its own and pay the NCC membership fee. In any case, Nigel's problem statement is very similar to the one presented by Sascha Pollok in Athens as the rationale for 2013-05: https://ripe67.ripe.net/archives/video/32/ http://www.ripe.net/ripe/policies/proposals/2013-05 Considering that 2013-05 blitzed through the PDP with hardly any opposition, I'd say that Nigel's worry that moving around the addresses in the manner described is considered "reprehensible" is completely unfounded; "totally OK" would be more accurate, I think. Tore