Direct allocations solutions

I would like to hear the opinion of the group on solutions for the ARIN minimum /20 justification. In my opinion IP growth and the demand for direct allocations conflict each other.

My small business has a minimal number of hosts however that is no reason I shouldn't provide the highest level of service for myself and my customers, specifically solutions for single points of failure. Upon multi-homing I wished to purchase IP's directly from ARIN to minimize the impact I might experience if my primary provider (which controls my IP's) might go under, or for any other reason become unable to provide service. I was obviously unable to _truthfully_ justify so I slowly made an attempt to increase my real host count by no longer making a best effort to minimize my IP usage. I am a strong believe in helping for a cause, however without lying, cheating, or stealing how do multi-homed networks with only /22 utilization obtain the benefits of a direct allocation? I partially understand ARIN's reasoning and policies for not providing smaller blocks, and have been reading about portable blocks, however its obviously been a long standing problem for others in my position to find a solution without faking/inflating justifications.

My primary solution is the idea of sharing a /20 with another individual in my similar position. This obviously has faults, however I believe it is an increased safety net from my current situation. Are there are rules/policies that would prohibit this? If not, why have I not seen "IP Brokers/Resellers"?

To conclude, there has been a lot of talk on several mailing lists about quality vs. quantity of bandwidth, I personally am hosted on cogent which has provided the service I expected (taking into account the price), however the financial situation of several ISP's is critical, which only emphasizes the overall demand of stable IP blocks.

If the thread concludes IP blocks can be shared, I hope to start some type of IP broker mailing list or similar, to solve this problem for others. If anyone is interested in this or sharing an IP block please contact me off-list.

Also, I would be interested to hear what ARIN has to say as I honestly have not contacted them about this yet, and unfortunately decided to get the response from the public first.

Thank you,

Matt

My primary solution is the idea of sharing a /20 with another individual in
my similar position. This obviously has faults, however I believe it is an
increased safety net from my current situation.

minus the fact that unless you're in the same physical location sharing
the same router, you're going to have to make separate, longer, and
therefore possibly filtered announcements, which negates the purpose of
having the shorter-prefixed network in the first place.

and if you _are_ in the same physical location as someone you wish to share
networking hardware/facilities with, it's probably easier to just go talk
to them as opposed to starting a mailing list to help people find-a-friend
in their same building.

s.

You may want to look through the archives. This has been discusses at some
length in the past year or two.

You best bet: come to the ARIN meeting and make your case for a change in
policy.

- Dan

Hello Matt,

Also, I would be interested to hear what ARIN has to say
as I honestly have not contacted them about this yet, and
unfortunately decided to get the response from the public
first.

Policies for obtaining blocks of IP address space from ARIN
are defined by the community. Detailed information about ARIN's
Internet Resource Policy Evaluation Process is available at the
following location.

  https://www.arin.net/participate/policy/pdp/

There have been proposals recently to make allocations
smaller than a /20 available to multi-homed organizations.
Information about these proposals is available at:

  http://www.arin.net/policy/proposal_archive.html

The policy proposal discussions take place on ARIN's
Public Policy Mailing List (PPML) and at the bi-annual
ARIN Public Policy Meetings. ARIN mailing list information
(including archives) and information about upcoming ARIN
meetings is available at the following locations.

  https://www.arin.net/participate/community/mailing_lists/

  http://www.arin.net/membership/meetings/index.html

Best Regards,

Richard Jimmerson
Director of Operations
American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)