[AFRINIC-rpd] Academic IPv4 Allocation Policy Second Draft (AFPUB-2013-GEN-001-DRAFT-02)

[Owen DeLong]

Nii,

First, please understand that I do not actually have a dog in this fight. I will neither benefit from any proposed policy, nor am I a victim of any current policy. My interest here is strictly what I believe to be good for Africa and for the internet as a whole.

I also recognize that while I am very fond of the region and all of my friends in the region, I do not live in the region and as such, when push comes to shove, I certainly defer to those who do.

In my opinion, the question is not whether or how people design networks or document them.

The question is how much effort should AfriNIC staff be required to put into reviewing a request from a university? How much scrutiny do we need to apply to such requests? Are there rules of thumb that can be used to provide guidance to the staff which will facilitate a simplified application process with greater fairness and better outcomes for all with less labor required on both sides?

I believe that the amount of effort being expended on both sides of this equation (which translates into costs as well) is excessive compared to the task at hand based on documentation provided by both AfriNIC staff and others throughout this thread and in other discussions I've had with people.

Further, I believe that Universities and other institutions of learning in the region represent the best hope for advancing various goals of development in the region. ICT investment and internet capabilities are huge levers for education, if applied properly. As such, I believe it is strongly in the best interests of the region to maximize the ease of implementing ICT in educational institutions and facilitating student use of ICT and internet capabilities.

I believe that the discussion thus far has well established that a fully developed ICT infrastructure with students that are not financially or otherwise disadvantaged in their ability to possess devices can readily justify a rule of thumb around 5:1 IPv4 addresses per student or more. This includes not only the student devices, but also addresses for faculty, staff, university owned equipment, network infrastructure, etc. As such, I believe providing a policy which allows a University to apply to AfriNIC and use their student count with an agreed upon ratio provides a good rule of thumb which can allow a simplified justification process while still preventing abuse. AfriNIC expends less resources reviewing the request. The university spends less time going back and forth with AfriNIC staff over the justification. It's better for everyone.

Are there universities that don't need such a large ratio just yet? Sure there are. Especially in the region. However, I would argue that it is far better if such universities are allowed to get the address space even if they can't use it today because it will support and potentially encourage them to develop better student ICT facilities which will improve the quality of their educational experience.

I do not understand the argument in favor of preserving address poverty simply because other forms of poverty prevent taking full advantage of address wealth at the moment. Let us, instead, first resolve address poverty because it is easy to do so. Then we can continue to work on the other forms.

Owen



On Feb 5, 2013, at 2:55 AM, Nii Narku Quaynor <quaynor at ghana.com> wrote:

> 
> On Feb 5, 2013, at 8:05, Guy Antony Halse <G.halse at ru.ac.za> wrote:
> 
>>  All the policy says is that ratios up-to and including 5:1 do not need
>>  *additional* justification; ratios greater than 5:1 do.  It is a somewhat
>>  arbitrary (but well informed and objective) cut-off to determine at what
>>  point AfriNIC should start asking more questions.
>> 
>> 
> What does it mean to 'ask more questions'?
> 
> I am puzzled by desire of this draft policy to provide *no* network information to obtain network resources. Obviously, all operators design networks with ratios, workloads and benchmarks but one makes the resource requests based on what is being built - the network  :-)_______________________________________________
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