Dear colleagues, as most of you will know major changes will happen to the external routing topology between significant European ISPs. A major problem with this is the uncertainty about when exactly changes will happen and what their precise nature will be. Fortunately we now have a Routing Registry and tools to use it. Registering your routing policy in the registry immediately makes the information available to all other ISPs who can use it to diagnose problems. This can supplement or even eliminate mail messages about the changes which often do not reach all those affected. I strongly suggest that all service providers (YOU!) register any changes *as they are made*. Having a real time image on how things *should* work will certainly help others to keep instabilities at a minimum and make external routing work how it should. Tools like prpath and prtraceroute will show the new intended paths immediately and compare them to actual paths being used. Once you have a concrete plan for a major change, register it too as remarks in the aut-num object. While this cannot be used by the diagnostic tools it may be useful to humans who try to understand what is happening. Registering routing policies as they are changed will help to minimise instabilities caused by the reconfigurations and facilitate debugging of problems. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us. Regards Daniel Karrenberg RIPE NCC Manager