Policy Statement on Address Space Allocations

Fri Jan 26 14:03:19 UTC 1996

Jeff Young wrote:

| say what you will about this policy, but someone (sean?) thought 
| long and hard about it's implications.  i didn't like the abrupt
| manner in which it was implemented, but it does take guts and it
| is pretty elegant:

Thanks, Jeff.  Once again I shall repeat my apologies -- 
the original intent was to make sure the filters would break
things on day one, rather than retroactively apply to the
number of people whose route announcements had been leaked
in by mistake.

Despite the immediate retrospective thought that
it was a cute way to avoid accusations of collusion
among big providers, I did very much regret the work
you folks and others had to do when this got dropped
into place.

OTOH, well, there had been several months' warning about the
details... 

But still, sorry that it wasn't as smooth as it could
have been if there hadn't been a flaw in the filtering
that crept in in about April, long before anyone was
even really thinking of allocating from 206.0.0.0/8.

However, as I think everyone remembers, after a short while,
in an effort to assist in getting aggregation of the
then-announced bits of 206.0.0.0/8 working OK and giving
people some time to get used to the filtering, I did relax
the filtering on 206.0.0.0/8 to permit /19s.

As you note, this was to the benefit of other peoples' customers.

| the real message is if you have a 206+ address, make sure that your 
| provider can put it into an aggregation block for you (or go to sprint).

Right, and we have been warning our customer base for
some time that if they announce a 206+ address that is
not aggregatable into something reasonably big (like a /18),
they run the risk of losing connectivity to other providers
if they ever were to impose similar filters for business
or technical reasons.

Meanwhile, yes, it's a slight competitive advantage. :-)

(Frankly though, that was a at first side-effect of not
having the ability to do the outbound filtering immediately,
but it rapidly seemed like a smart thing to do to make other
people think about similar filtering.

An interesting thing to wonder about is how different the
early days of CIDR deployment would have been if rather
than aggregating at the source, people were to have set
up some sort of inbound filtering at places like MAE-EAST.)

| nobody said it would be boring. :-)

Yup.

	Sean.