Policy Statement on Address Space Allocations

Tue Jan 30 20:08:05 UTC 1996

Michael,

> > So these providers are providing the free transit to their
> > non-customers?
> > 
> > This does not make any business sense; it will not happen.
> 
> The proper solution is for all these companies to form a consortium. The 
> consortium would run the NAP and contract with multiple NSP's for 
> service. In that case, the NSP's are not providing transit to 
> non-customers because the consortium is the customer and every ISP who 
> joins the consortium gets multihoming reliability outside the region. 

Forming a consortium is certainly an alternative for ISPs that
aren't big enough, so that they don't provide a degree
of addressing information aggregation sufficient to justify
their routes to float throughout the "default-free" zone of the
Internet. The consortium would acquire a (faily large) block of
addresses, which would be partitioned among the members of the
consortium. The consortium could run its own "backbone" (e.g., NAP)
that would provide all members of the consortium with connectivity
to other parts of the Internet. The basic connectivity (what I would
call "route push") would be provided via this "backbone". The "backbone"
would also perform address information aggregation into a single prefix.
Additional connectivity can be acquired by the individual members
of the consortium via "route pull", but this connectivity would be
just to get better routers.

This way a small ISP would have a choice of joining a consortium
(and there may be a choice of consortiums to join) and get its
addresses out of the consortium's block, or to connect to a large
NSP and get its addresses out of the large NSP.

However, one needs to understand the consortium model has its
own issues ...

Yakov.