On 2/3/2011 9:32 AM, Scott Helms wrote:
John,
I would hope that if some ARIN policy is enacted there would be
some way to differentiate between organizations, like the one I belong
to, that have provided this kind of service to customers for a number
of years and organizations looking to take advantage of the new
scarcity. We have and do provide IP space for other ISPs (mainly
small and mid size) despite not providing connectivity for a number of
reasons. We began providing this as a way of getting connectivity
provider independent space to ISPs that lacked their own ASN and
usually were not multi-homed because I had so many ISPs changing their
upstream provider that it was causing us issues in both our
engineering and call center teams. We provide network engineering
(think re-IPing lots of ISP networks) and end user technical support
(think lots of calls from upset customer who had to change their
static IP) for many ISPs around the country. We certainly don't have
a huge allocation, we have 209 /24s reassigned and 9 reallocated
currently. We also pass along all of the usage and reporting
requirements that ARIN requires of us. We also don't make money on
the practice we charge a small amount on an annual basis for record
keeping. As I said, we started this mainly to prevent network
disruption and extra work _not_ as a profit center.
How a line might be drawn I don't know, but its important to
understand that there are very legitimate reasons to reassign or
reallocate space even if you are not providing connectivity for a
given network.
It isn't at all clear to me how your business model is different from an
ISP that chooses to connect their customer base to the Internet by
buying multiple transit connections that happen to terminate very close
to the customer's CPE.
Or an ISP that has its own IP space but is letting their DSL aggregator
announce it and provide the downstream DSL circuits to the ISP's customers.
Seems perfectly legitimate to me.
Matthew Kaufman
