Is it permissible to advertise number resources allocated by one RIR to a ISP in a region governed by a different RIR? Practical?

Wed Feb 9 21:27:48 UTC 2011

On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 1:17 PM, Jon Lewis <jlewis at lewis.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Feb 2011, Crooks, Sam wrote:
>
>> Is it permissible, from a policy perspective, for a multi-homed end user
>> to announce the numbering resource allocation received from one RIR (for
>> discussion purposes, let's say ARIN) to upstream service providers in a
>> different region (for example, in the RIPE region)?
>
> Nope.  The RIR-police will shut you down.

Mean, Jon.  Mean.  8-)

> Just kidding.  I'm in ARIN's region and have a customer in Africa for whom
> we're announcing AFRINIC space.  It happens.  As long as you have
> authorization from the registrant (I'd say owner, but the RIR-semantics
> police would come for me) of the space, I wouldn't worry about utilizing
> "out of region" numbering resources.
>
> This sort of thing probably happens quite a bit more than you'd guess...both
> legitmately and not.

I believe all the big multihomed multinational organizations generally
all do this; the ones I've worked with (banks) all did.

It would sort of defeat the purpose of multihoming if you couldn't
announce not just to other providers, but in some circumstances
multi-geographically.  If my multihoming crosses a RIR boundary it's
still multihoming.  One of those RIRs is probably "home territory" to
ask for allocations from, but in any case there shouldn't be a
technical or policy block to anouncing ARIN space in RIPE land, or any
similar variation thereof.

-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com