[AfriNIC-rpd] IPv4 Soft Landing Policy

[Graham Beneke]

On 12/05/2010 19:18, Douglas Onyango wrote:
> During the exhaustion phase, the following allocation and assignment
> policy for the last /8 IPv4 address will be used:
> a) Instead of the /22 block (1024) addresses allocated in the current
> policy, the new minimum allocation size of /24 (256 addresses) will be
> allocated to any LIR that qualifies for IPv4 resources - /23 (512) will
> be the maximum allocation size possible and even though LIRs may request
> for more than this, LIRs will not be able to get more a /23 in a single
> allocation - they also will not get more than 4 allocations once the
> Exhaustion phase has began.

I think that the minimum allocation size of /24 is reasonable. During 
the dying days of IPv4 many ASNs are likely to announce their IPv6 space 
and just one /24 for legacy purposes.

The rest of the paragraph concerns me:

You state that an LIR may request no more than a /23 and up to 4 of 
those. Four /23s is /21 of address space. In the case that an LIR 
determines that they require /21 of address space they submit 4 
applications for address space (concurrently or sequentially). This 
results in x4 the volume of admin by the LIR and x4 the volume of work 
for the AfriNIC resource officer with no perceived benefit to the community.

You limit each LIR to a /21 of addressing resources. That provides for 
7680 (excluding the reserved /12) LIRs to obtain maximum allocations. 
AfriNIC currently has 1009 members and a growth rate of less than 100 
members per year[1]. This means that at the end of 5 years 80% of our 
final /8 will be locked up and un-allocatable under this policy.

I think that it would be a good idea to have an upper bound on 
allocations to LIRs during the exhaustion phase. I would like to propose 
that /18 per LIR would be a far more reasonable limit in terms of our 
current membership trends.

I personally don't see any benefit in restricting the size of each 
individual application to a level lower than this upper bound. If an LIR 
can justify the need for a certain size of prefix under our policies 
then there is no benefit to be had by forcing additional administrative 
overhead.

References:

[1] http://www.afrinic.net/statistics/member_stats.htm

regards
-- 
Graham Beneke
Apolix Internet Services
E-Mail/MSN/Jabber: graham at apolix.co.za   Skype: grbeneke
VoIP: 087-550-1010                       Cell: 082-432-1873
http://www.apolix.co.za/