Service providers that NAT their whole network?

Wed Apr 20 03:17:40 UTC 2005

On Apr 19, 2005, at 10:57 PM, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:

> One possible reason would be that quite often the people there are not
> very capable at bgp at all .. so someone who's selling them routers
> gives them a static route to their upstream, then they give their
> downstream customers a word doc with a template that assigns the
> downstreams yet another static route ...

I think (or at least I hope) that folks that fit your description are 
identified by the registries and routed to the education track before 
their applications are approved. I am not (entirely) naive -- and am 
quite pleased to have the opportunity to contribute to ongoing 
education efforts through APRICOT -- so I am sure that some share of 
allocated-but-never-routed ASNs could be explained away as you suggest. 
That said, the cases I am obliquely referring to are established, fully 
clue-embued enterprises -- some even service providers -- with 
competent engineers on staff.  I.e., operators that applied for, met 
the criteria, and received a public ASN plus IP allocation from an RIR.

TV