Policy Statement on Address Space Allocations

Sat Jan 27 03:06:58 UTC 1996

Original message <4D07037D30 at hq.mainet.com>
From: "Vincent J. Bono" <VBONO at hq.mai.net>
Date: Jan 26, 20:57
Subject: Re: Policy Statement on Address Space Allocations
> 
...
> 
> How about trying to prevent the static assignment of addresses to 
> dial-in customers?  This chews IP space like there was no tomorrow...
> 
>-- End of excerpt from "Vincent J. Bono"

Actually, I suspect that's one of the MOST efficient uses of addresses.
We fill a handful of class C equivalents with our static-IP single-address
dialup customers, but those are filled to capacity and used daily, whereas
most of our small-business customers have an entire class C equivalent
each, and only have a dozen hosts, if that, on their LAN so far.

I feel much better about using 254/256 addresses serving 254 customers
than I do about using 12/256 addresses serving 1 customer.

As for the whole routing issue, I'm VERY sad to see so many people in 
support of address assignment and routing policy that effectively locks
out smaller providers. Were we starting today, rather than back in 1993,
we'd be stuck with our original provider, or face renumbering if we wanted
to switch to a higher-performance provider AND connect to MAE-West, as
we've done. If word gets out that going with a small provider == having
to renumber your corporate hosts regularly, big providers will have
effectively locked small players out of the market... which helps their
pocketbooks at the expense of a lot of other people. 

At this rate we're going to see the policy change to "each RBOC gets a /7
out of the old class A space, and then that's it"

-matthew kaufman
 matthew at scruz.net