wet-behind-the-ears whippersnapper seeking advice on building a nationwide network

Fri Sep 16 21:34:38 UTC 2011

On Fri, 16 Sep 2011, Randy Carpenter wrote:

>> I wonder what would happen if a new ARIN member requested an IPv4
>> block of say a /16 for a new business? Or even a smaller block. I
>> don't know what the current ARIN rules are but RIPE will currently
>> give out six months worth of space. Now, in six months, I don't
>> expect there to be any left anyway, so what will likely be all the
>> v4 you ever get.
>
> As an ISP, ARIN will not give you any space if you are new. You have to 
> already have an equivalent amount of space from another provider. I 
> think it is really stupid, and encourages wasting IP space, but that is 
> what the current policy is.

If you go to ARIN, day one, and ask for address space, they have no way of 
determining if your request is justified, beyond whatever pie-in-the-sky 
guesses and growth projections you give them.  You're asking for address 
space, sight unseen, in this case.  That would be like someone going to a 
bank and asking for a loan, with no documentation, collateral, or anything 
else to give the bank confidence that they'll pay the loan back.

That's why the slow-start model has been used, particularly for v4 space.
If you started off by getting PA space from one or more of your upstreams, 
then there should be additional documentation to back up your request 
(SWIP entries, RWHOIS data, etc).

When I still worked in the ISP world, the startup I worked for started off 
with PA space, and then grew into PI space, and handed the PA space back 
to their upstreams as it was vacated.  I had no problems getting subsequent
PI blocks because our documentation was in order.

jms