APNIC Member Meeting Seoul, Korea, 3 March 2000

APNIC Open Address policy Meeting

Discussion Paper: Provider Independent allocations, and special assignments for "essential" infrastructure

(This document revised 11 February 2000)

Problem Definition

Under what circumstances should APNIC make Provider Independent (PI) assignments?

1. Background

APNIC is frequently approached by organisations, either directly or through existing members, which state that they need to obtain Provider Independent (PI) address space. In most cases the applicants require the PI block to address a conventional multihomed network, while in other cases, the applicants claim to require the address space for a piece of "essential infrastructure" (such as public exchange points, country code TLDs etc).

APNIC currently makes PI assignments to end users in either of two ways:

a) Through the non-member assignment policy, which is open to any applicant (and involves a one-time fee payment of USD8,192).

b) Through a request submitted by a current APNIC member on behalf of the applicant (in which case there is no charge to the member or applicant).

2. Motivation

APNIC needs a clearer policy framework because there is a significant inconsistency between these two mechanisms for dealing with PI requests.

3. Current status (including other RIRs)

APNIC
As described above, PI address space can be obtained from APNIC through either one of the two procedures.

RIPE NCC
A RIPE NCC member can request a PI assignment on behalf of a customer. In general the same criteria are applied to PI requests as to PA requests. However, PI is generally discouraged, and concrete and valid reasons must be presented by the customer in order to justify PI assignments.

ARIN
Organisations which require a block of PI address space can receive an assignment from ARIN if they are multihomed, have utilised a /21 from their upstream provider, and demonstrate a need for a /20. There is one exception, which states that public exchange points can receive a /24 from public address space; however, this space should not be routed on the Internet.

The issue of "micro-allocations" (that is, small PI assignments) has been recently discussed at an ARIN member meeting, and at the time of writing is due to be raised at a BOF at NANOG on 5-6 February.

This document will be updated with the details of the discussion at the NANOG BOF as they become available.

4. Discussion

This issue requires consideration on technical, administrative, and financial grounds.

Technical considerations
CIDR promotes a hierarchical routing structure through Provider Aggregatable (PA) assignments to end-sites and helps to reduce the pressure on the global routing tables. Excessive use of PI assignments has the opposite effect because providers are required to announce and route prefixes from outside their own ranges. With these routing implications in mind, the following questions arise:

i) Does the type of site matter when considering a request for a PI assignment?

If yes,

• Should small assignments be available for "essential infrastructure"?
• If so, how can we define "essential infrastructure"? (e.g. root servers, domain registries (ccTLD, gTLD), RIRs, NIRs, public exchange points, etc.)

ii) Does the size of site matter?

If yes,

• Should PI assignments be available for end-user sites which are sufficiently large (as in ARIN's policy)?
• If yes, what size should be considered large enough?

iii) Does the type of connectivity matter?

• Should it be mandatory that the organisation is multihomed and running BGP?
• If yes, is the type of multihoming relevant? Is there a difference between sites multihomed to a single provider or sites multihomed to different providers? Is there a difference between multihoming for backup and multihoming for load balancing?

Administrative considerations
i) The policy allowing end-user PI requests via APNIC members (based on the RIPE NCC policy) is not well-known.

ii) Different NIRs have different policies - leading to a possible lack of consistency across region.

iii) There is no formal relationship or contract with APNIC in the case of non-member resource assignments (though these may be defined within a Resource Lease framework in future).

Financial considerations
i) Should PI requestors be APNIC members of some form (implying that requesting through an upstream provider is discontinued)?

ii) Is the current charging model (using a very high fee of USD8,192 to discourage PI requests) adequate?

5. Recommendations

APNIC is seeking feedback from the community in the development of a more consistent and equitable framework to address these issues. To assist in this it is useful to summarise the options:

a) Allow the non-member policy and fee of USD8,192 ONLY;
b) Allow members to submit requests on behalf of their customers ONLY;
c) Continue with a combination of both (current status);
d) Something entirely new, such as creating a special PI membership category with strictly defined eligibility criteria.

Of the above, APNIC would recommend that b) is discontinued: it is the weakest position as it leaves APNIC with no formal link to the requesting organisation but still required to provide services to them free of charge in the form of in-addr.arpa service and whois maintenance.

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