IP allocations, renumbering, and RFC 2050

Thu Oct 8 04:25:15 UTC 1998

In message <199810080328.UAA03926 at condor.lvrmr.mhsc.com>, "Roeland M.J. Meyer" 
writes:
>At 08:33 PM 10/7/98 -0400, Scott Gifford wrote:
>>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?
>
>Our most recent renumber involved paying for an extra three months of
>NetCom connectivity, until all our numbers and equioment were cleanly
>renumbered.

No doubt someone will claim you have some type of real estate interest
involved, and depending on local law, you may have rights to sit on
the IPs until lawfully evicted.
:)
But seriously I would suggest that you would have some expectation
of rights due to RFC2050 as much as any properity rights exist for
so called legacy addresses.

At any rate it sounds like a unilaterial contract change by CW,
which may be unenforcable.  I'd just continue to announce the
more specifics for 6 months just to make it as difficult as possible
for CW to re-use them.

It won't win CW and friends that's for sure. (hello AGIS/Net99, anyone?)

---
Jeremy Porter, Freeside Communications, Inc.      jerry at fc.net
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