Small ISP or no, how far off are you from begin multi-homed? Growing pains
in the Internet are very real--time and money. If you're growing only
another /24 in the next 6-12, then you may be able to squeeze that our of
your current provider (i.e. buy time to see if DSL will pull in the revenue
to justify the additional costs and administration). If you only have one
provider and did not mention any poor service, they very well may be worth
keeping as a redundant link--but they will always own and pay for those
addresses. Then you must consider whether leasing from a second provider or
leasing from ARIN is best for you. If you see continued growth, I would make
the plunge and revel in the discoveries.
You can be allocated blocks from ARIN in a 2-3 week period of time; another
provider bringing you a DS-3 (or whatever) could take 6+ depending on your
location.
Keep your plans flexible.
--jeff
"Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send."
--Jon Postel
- Original Message -
From: "Joel Baker" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "David Schwartz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, June 27, 2002 12:18 PM
Subject: Re: ARIN IP allocation questionn
>
> On Thu, Jun 27, 2002 at 01:56:26AM -0700, David Schwartz wrote:
> >
> > >My *personal* opinion is that wise ISPs only punt customers to ARIN
once
> > >they reach the point where they can, in fact, have a normal ARIN
netblock
> > >assigned directly to them (currently a /20, unless I slept through
another
> > >change...)
> >
> > The guidelines have a strong preference for singly-homed networks to
> > use IP address space allocated to them from their upstreams. I can think
> > of no logical reason* an ISP would prefer their customers to go to ARIN
> > rather than deal with them. The global routing table is better off for
it
> > as well, as the customer's /20 would be a new route, rather than being
> > included in their provider's presumably larger block.
>
> The assumption that the ISP has a larger block is not always a wise one
> to make.
>
> > On the other hand, I can think of many reasons a customer would prefer
> > to deal with ARIN than their upstream, assuming the meager cost wasn't a
> > factor and they don't mind polluting the global table a tad. Of course,
> > that's not really an operational issue.
>
> Most of the places I've worked would be charging them for the IP usage
> either way, since the ISP has to pay ARIN, eventually...
>
> > DS
> >
> > * The only reason I could possibly think of is if the ISP is afraid
that
> > the large allocation will impact their future allocations because they
> > don't have the confidence or competence to extract a proper
justification
> > from their customer and present/defend that justification to ARIN when
> > their next allocation comes up. But this wasn't the reason you were
> > thinking of, right?
>
> See above. Sometimes you have lots of IP space, but nothing *large*, due
to
> business constraints. This often changes over time, but some of us don't
> have multiple legacy /16s from Back In The Day (and then again, some of us
> do - but not the 'us' I work for, anymore).
>
> Not under NDA, since all of it can be found by asking ARIN, of course. :)
> --
>
***
> Joel Baker System Administrator -
lightbearer.com
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://users.lightbearer.com/lucifer/
>
