[AfriNIC-rpd] IPv4 Soft Landing Policy

[McTim]

Graham,

On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 10:04 PM, Graham Beneke <graham-ml at apolix.co.za> wrote:
> 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.

That works for me, I guess.

>
> 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.

Sounds about right.

>
> 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.
>

This is a deal-breaker for me. I am sure it is an unintended
consequence, nice catch!


> 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.

Yes, but then each of the 1000 plus LIRs wouldn't be able to get a /18
out of the last /8.  /19 might work better, as then there would be a
bit of "locked-up" space available to play with once we figure out how
the community wants to allocate the very last dregs (besides the /12
in reserve).

Who knows, maybe their will be folks so desperate in the "market" at
that point that the NIC could flog off the last few bits for billions
of USD, I think the community would be hard pressed to say no that
that kind of cash ;-)


>
> 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.

Agreed.

My sense is that the intent of the policy is to lengthen the lifetime
of v4.  It also aims to protect "African" IP space for Africans, which
is a laudable goal.

As I have said before, I wish that these two goals were not co-mingled
in one policy proposal.

Can we get some feedback from Reg Svcs about their sense of the admin
overhead on their side?


-- 
Cheers,

McTim
"A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A
route indicates how we get there."  Jon Postel