Answers inline again. > -----Original Message----- > From: James Jun [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Tuesday, 31 January 2006 5:13 AM > To: 'Christopher Martin'; [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Cc: ipv6@ietf.org > Subject: RE: IPv6 Research/Not-for-profit Addressing > > Chris, > > One thing to consider as others have pointed out is that, RIR fees do not > typically treat non-profits any better than for-profits. The RIRs > themselves are technically non-profit corporations and they are charging > for > management and allocation of address space, not what you do with them. So > fees would typically apply the same whether you are commercial ISP or not. > > One exception however is in ARIN (RIPE may have this also, not sure about > APNIC as I never dealt with them previously) has an experimental > allocation > service, which reduces the fees than that of regular allocation. These > experimental allocations are not designated for research networks to be > used > for long term-- b/c if you are given an experimental allocation for > reduced > fee, it is only short term lease, and you would need to describe the > outcome > and purpose of your research for the duration of that lease. But if you > are > looking to provide long-term services like you are with your project, your > best bet is to take the RIR's cost for regular allocation, then divide it > by > the number of members you have and have everyone pay a portion of it to > get > it going..
The problem is the chicken and the egg. For the network to be successful where it can grow to the point where it can pay for addressing out of the membership fees it needs to be feature complete, and the system relies on IPv6 addressing. Now, if we were to get a small allocation from a tunnel broker or some upstream ISP, there would inevitably come a point where we had to renumber, once we could afford our own space. An ISP just accepts the cost of the labour of such works, but we rely on donated time, and again it would be a waste of this very limited resource to re-engineer a network when we knew perfectly well what was required to prevent it. We are not like a start-up company. We have no seed funding, we have no investors. Now, if a generous benefactor offered us enough funding to get two years APNIC membership then we could get the addresses, build the network and grow the membership base, but this has not happened as yet. > At lease this is how most governmental and private-sector funded research > networks are run. They charge membership fee, and use that to pay costs > like this; if there is no membership fee, and then have everyone bear the > cost of RIR fees. Besides, if you don't have enough members on your > network > that cost-sharing model doesn't work out, then you probably won't be able > to > meet RIR's policies for getting a /32 space either if you have that little > users. Unfortunately our government is like most: run by stupid old men, and it is more and more like the US every year: stupid old men in the pocket of big business. Not that I'm suggesting our honourable female politicians are bribe free, more a statement that there is still such a massive imbalance between the gender's representation. Moving on... People believe that self regulation industry works, and unfortunately the truth is that it doesn't. This is what has driven the creation of community networks: there is a need for networks where people can: * be an equal with any other, whether they can afford membership of an RIR or not * be independent of a service provider so that you can move if they make your position untenable * share whatever services they want, how they want * have access to new technologies as they are developed, not whenever the ISPs deign to give them to us. People would not even bother with community networks if there wasn't a clear and obvious need for them. The simple reality is that currently the features most likely to be developed are those a company funds, and decisions are most likely to favour the company who spends the most campaigning. To say that commercial interests don't have a disproportionate opportunity to skew the industry is to be incredibly naive. -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPv6 working group mailing list ipv6@ietf.org Administrative Requests: https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipv6 --------------------------------------------------------------------
