Policy Statement on Address Space Allocations

Havard.Eidnes at runit.sintef.no Havard.Eidnes at runit.sintef.no
Sat Jan 27 18:08:39 UTC 1996


Hi,

I see Daniel hasn't answered this one (weekend for some, I guess ;-)

> > The point is that we will guarantee that our allocation policy
> > will create no more than 1024 allocations per /8 and therefore
> > not necessitate by itself more routes than that.  Currently our
> > allocation sizes are /19 - /16.  If you think about it a little
> > you will see that it is easy to achieve.
> >
> > And just in case: Yes the minimum allocation is /19 irrespective
> > of the number of hosts covered. Note: allocation != assignment.
>
> OK, so just to make it clear, if a customer would come to the RIPE
> NCC and the customer has just 1 host you would still allocated him
> /19 block.  Correct?

This may be obvious to some familiar to the european networking
scene already, but anyway...  The RIPE NCC itself does in general
not deal directly with end customers, only with local registries.
To be allocated address space directly from the RIPE NCC you have to
first establish yourself as a local registry, pay the startup fee
and contribute to the financing of the running costs of the RIPE
NCC.  Remember, there is noone else than the organizations running
the local registries who are picking up the tab for running the RIPE
NCC.  The typical local registry is also an ISP.

Also note the distinction between allocation and assignment made by
Daniel which could be lost on some.  In this specific case
allocation means "address space allocated for a local registry for
subsequent assignment to customers".

I've seen people critizising the RIPE NCC for their inflexible
policies and the practicing of these policies.  One important aspect
of the RIPE NCC policies when allocating address space to registries
is simplicity and uniformity of policy, because one of the worst
things that could happen for the RIPE NCC would be for them to
rightfully be accused of giving unfair preferential treatment to
some registries (=~ ISPs) over others.  The chance of this happening
(or the RIPE NCC being accused of it) increases with the fuzziness
of policies and the amount of evaluation and judgement the RIPE NCC
has to apply to individual cases.

I think this is fairly accurate, but since this is not coming from
the authoritative source I may have made minor mistakes in
formulating the above.

Regards,

- Havard



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