Policy Statement on Address Space Allocations

Fri Jan 26 21:38:27 UTC 1996

Forrest,

> This method would have (at least) the following advantages (or 
> disadvantages, from your particular viewpoint):
> 
>   1) You could reasonably assure that the number of prefixes in an 
>      /8 would match what was allocated.
> 
>   2) Because of 1, if you get the registries to set their
>      allocation policies such that no more than 1024 (or the target number)
>      blocks are allocated per /8, you can guarantee that the number of
>      routes in an /8 is not too far out of wack with the target.
> 
>   3) You can give those people moving providers a grace period to renumber,
>      say 30 days.  Essentially, the time given to clean up the routing
>      tables.  This would be a side effect of the "you have 30 days to fix
>      the routing tables or else".
> 
>   4) You eliminate the wasted space of addresses with prefixes longer than
>      /18 being allocated.
> 
> The only problem this leaves is how to decide who gets an /18...

That is a *very good question*. Different answers to this question
have *quite different* implications on the address space utilization.

Yakov.