Dear colleagues,

In the past three weeks, we have done some tests on 3 AFRINIC /24 which have been announced in the US, Europe, and Asia, by an ARIN ASN, APNIC ASN, and an RIPE ASN.

Test results:

If it is a direct announce to NTT, Telia, GTT as a small provider and without route object, announcement will not be accepted. All of them accept RIPE route object.

If you announce to one of the telecoms, and that telecom happens to accept your announcement without route object, then all the other telecoms will have to accept the announcement without route object. This is simply because big guys trust each other.

In the example we tested, we first announced to NTT directly and got  rejected. Then we announce to CN2(next generation enterprise network of China telecom). After this NTT accepted the announcement from China telecom without route object created.

Current situation:

AFRINIC accepts foreign ASN with manual verification of the ownership of the ASN holder as stated by their hostmaster in the mailing list. If you don't own the ASN, they will not create the route object. Despite this, the process is long and unpractical in daily operation.

Some providers do accept RPKI. One can create an AFRINIC RPKI that go though the filter, however, not all provider accept RPKI at the moment. 

In conclusion, If you employ a non-Afrinic asn for announcements (which means a foreign asn), using RIPE’s route object will be the only choice for you unless you are one of those big telecoms which has the liberty to announce anything as they wish.

I am not opposing to the idea of cleaning up the database, but until things get fixed, the current process will only break networks.