ARIN sucks?

Sun Sep 17 06:56:02 UTC 2006

>All our experiences consulting our clients about how to get their AS and 
>Subnets have been pretty easy and fast.
>
>First get enought IP from 2 Peer to justify at least a /21;
>
>Now that you have 2 Peer, request the AS and a Subnet from ARIN;
>
>Take a day or 2 to prepare the paperwork;
>
>Submit it in the right sequence to ARIN;
>
>And LISTEN to your ARIN rep, they know how the procedure must be done and 
>will help your get it done correctly.
>
>Simple really.

It is indeed simple if you know what needs to be done and what is 
expected.  Even in your case above you mislead people into thinking that 
one can "request the AS and a Subnet from ARIN".  After setting up the 
various POCs (step #1), step #2 is getting an ORG.  Step #3 is requesting 
the IP space and *not* the ASN.  One can't get an ASN from ARIN *until* you 
have IP space.  Once you are authorized by ARIN for the IP space, one has 
to pay ARIN (step #4).  One can pay online via credit card, which for large 
organizations can sometimes be a problem.  In addition, ARIN doesn't accept 
American Express.  Therefore, step #4 might very well involve cutting a 
check and Fedex'ing it to ARIN and waiting till they process it.  Step #5, 
which can be done in parallel to step #4 is getting the ARIN Registration 
Service Agreement signed by your legal department.  Once again, depending 
on the size of your organization, this might take anywhere from 1-3 
weeks.  Step #6 is the ASN request.  In order to do that one needs to 
submit a signed copy of the two contracts one has with their upstreams (to 
justify the ASN).  Once again, these contracts might be buried in legal, 
need to be found and scanned and sent to ARIN before the ASN request can be 
processed.  Step #7 is paying for the ASN either online or by check (see 
step #4 above).

Those that stated the process to get IP and ASN from ARIN would be a week 
or so, might be referring to very small organizations (even there I am a 
bit skeptical).  My experience was that IP assignment took about a month 
and ASN took about a month.

Regards,
Hank Nussbacher
http://www.interall.co.il