IP allocations, renumbering, and RFC 2050

Thu Oct 8 00:33:36 UTC 1998

We have a customer who is in the process of moving from
MCI^H^H^HCable and Wireless to us.  They have been using MCI/CW for a while,
and need time to renumber their equipment, have their customers change
places they have hardcoded IP addresses, etc.  A quick read through RFC 2050
(IP Allocation Guidelines) talks about this situation in section 2.1:

    The ISP
    should allow sufficient time for the renumbering process to be
    completed before the IP addresses are reused.

However, the rep they spoke with at MCI/CW seems to feel that the moment the
connection is cancelled, the IP addresses may be reassigned to another
customer, and they should not expect a grace period for renumbering.

Anybody had any experience with this before?  Is it reasonable of me to
expect MCI/CW to be nice about the whole thing, and give their customer 6
months to renumber?  Or is this what everybody does, taking the "should"s in
the RFC very literally?

Anybody had any luck with the appeals process on things like this?

Thanks for any experience/info/ideas/reality checks,

--------Scott.