* Lu Heng
Almost every hosting company here in EU has customer from outside of region, they rent server from EU company for whatever reasons(for making their EU website for example), but they are outside of region.
If "end customer from outside of region can not assign IP addresses", then all EU hosting company can not sell any hosting package to a person in US for example, but that is not the case.
They can, if the hosted service is in the RIPE service region. For example: You (assuming you're located in China) can come to me and purchase a virtual machine hosted in my data center located in Norway. It will be numbered using RIPE region address space. No problems. I could also announce this address space to peers on a Chinese internet exchange and backhaul the traffic to Norway myself, if I wanted to. Still no problems there. However, if I build a data center in China I cannot use RIPE region address space to number it. (Even if the customers hosted in that were all incorporated in the RIPE region.) If this had been permitted, I doubt there would still be available IPv4 address space in the RIPE region at this point, as organisations in the APNIC region in need of IPv4 address space could just have set up LIRs in the RIPE region and allocate away. -- Tore Anderson Redpill Linpro AS - http://www.redpill-linpro.com