Direct allocations solutions

Tue May 13 18:59:57 UTC 2003

I would like to hear the opinion of the group on solutions for the ARIN 
minimum /20 justification. In my opinion IP growth and the demand for direct 
allocations conflict each other.

My small business has a minimal number of hosts however that is no reason I 
shouldn't provide the highest level of service for myself and my customers, 
specifically solutions for single points of failure. Upon multi-homing I 
wished to purchase IP's directly from ARIN to minimize the impact I might 
experience if my primary provider (which controls my IP's) might go under, 
or for any other reason become unable to provide service. I was obviously 
unable to _truthfully_ justify so I slowly made an attempt to increase my 
real host count by no longer making a best effort to minimize my IP usage. I 
am a strong believe in helping for a cause, however without lying, cheating, 
or stealing how do multi-homed networks with only /22 utilization obtain the 
benefits of a direct allocation?   I partially understand ARIN's reasoning 
and policies for not providing smaller blocks, and have been reading about 
portable blocks, however its obviously been a long standing problem for 
others in my position to find a solution without faking/inflating 
justifications.

My primary solution is the idea of sharing a /20 with another individual in 
my similar position. This obviously has faults, however I believe it is an 
increased safety net from my current situation. Are there are rules/policies 
that would prohibit this? If not, why have I not seen "IP 
Brokers/Resellers"?

To conclude, there has been a lot of talk on several mailing lists about 
quality vs. quantity of bandwidth, I personally am hosted on cogent which 
has provided the service I expected (taking into account the price), however 
the financial situation of several ISP's is critical, which only emphasizes 
the overall demand of stable IP blocks.

If the thread concludes IP blocks can be shared, I hope to start some type 
of IP broker mailing list or similar, to solve this problem for others. If 
anyone is interested in this or sharing an IP block please contact me 
off-list.

Also, I would be interested to hear what ARIN has to say as I honestly have 
not contacted them about this yet, and unfortunately decided to get the 
response from the public first.

Thank you,

Matt

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