You're right.
And as soon as the mainstream hardware we all sell to people, and that has
significant market penetration in the installed base, makes this reasonable
to do for a *large* operation, this will be reasonable.
However, as the state of IPV4 and its hardware sits right now, it is NOT
reasonable to do *other than on the boundaries of a customer's individual
decision*.
That is, if a PROVIDER changes upstream links, it is unreasonable to expect
their *customers* to renumber. To force that paradigm is to attempt to
tie an ISP to a given provider. The requirement to renumber comes out of the
blue, it is an unanticipated cost, and one which is neither under the
control of nor a result of the actions of the customer.
Better go talk to some attorneys before you do things that lead to this
result.
If a *customer* changes providers, they bear the costs of their actions.
If the operative cause of their renumbering is their decision to leave one
ISP and go to another, *they* are directly responsible for their own pain.
THAT is much more likely to pass muster.
Agreed.
And it is my opinion that upstream providers should allow (or be
required) portability of assigned IP addresses. Naturally, there are
some logistics that need to be dealt with, but if someone is BGP
peering, it pretty much boils down to an announcement change,
correct?
We, as a provider, would not mind paying some nominal fee (cheap!)
to our upstream provider for continued use of IP addresses after we
have terminated our service. We have even considered getting the
smallest possible connection to that particular provider just to be
able to continually use their IP addresses. This does not seem like
a very effective alternative for us or our upstream provider.
I am wondering what impact, if any, would requiring portability of
IP addresses under certain criteria (BGP peering, etc) have on the
Internet?
Talk to ya...
Sean
And it is my opinion that upstream providers should allow (or be
required) portability of assigned IP addresses.
Look at your contract with your upstream provider. Do you like what it
says? Start negotiating...
We, as a provider, would not mind paying some nominal fee (cheap!)
to our upstream provider for continued use of IP addresses after we
have terminated our service.
Now you're getting the idea. Only one problem, you need to tell this to
your upstream provider, not us. We can't negotiate your contract for you.
I am wondering what impact, if any, would requiring portability of
IP addresses under certain criteria (BGP peering, etc) have on the
Internet?
Require? Just who is going to "require" this? Who has the ability to
enforce a "requirement".
The best you can do is to work out some sort of consensus in the PAGAN
group and then hope that most people will accept that consensus and
implement it. This is generally how international trade negotiations
are handled and PAGAN is really no different except that in the Internet
world these negotiations are done with all the bureaucracy stripped away.
Send a subscribe message to pagan-request@apnic.net and hunt around
ftp.apnic.net for the archive of past PAGAN/IRE deliberations.
Michael Dillon - Internet & ISP Consulting
Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-250-546-3049
http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com