Hi, I see Daniel hasn't answered this one (weekend for some, I guess ;-)
The point is that we will guarantee that our allocation policy will create no more than 1024 allocations per /8 and therefore not necessitate by itself more routes than that. Currently our allocation sizes are /19 - /16. If you think about it a little you will see that it is easy to achieve.
And just in case: Yes the minimum allocation is /19 irrespective of the number of hosts covered. Note: allocation != assignment.
OK, so just to make it clear, if a customer would come to the RIPE NCC and the customer has just 1 host you would still allocated him /19 block. Correct?
This may be obvious to some familiar to the european networking scene already, but anyway... The RIPE NCC itself does in general not deal directly with end customers, only with local registries. To be allocated address space directly from the RIPE NCC you have to first establish yourself as a local registry, pay the startup fee and contribute to the financing of the running costs of the RIPE NCC. Remember, there is noone else than the organizations running the local registries who are picking up the tab for running the RIPE NCC. The typical local registry is also an ISP. Also note the distinction between allocation and assignment made by Daniel which could be lost on some. In this specific case allocation means "address space allocated for a local registry for subsequent assignment to customers". I've seen people critizising the RIPE NCC for their inflexible policies and the practicing of these policies. One important aspect of the RIPE NCC policies when allocating address space to registries is simplicity and uniformity of policy, because one of the worst things that could happen for the RIPE NCC would be for them to rightfully be accused of giving unfair preferential treatment to some registries (=~ ISPs) over others. The chance of this happening (or the RIPE NCC being accused of it) increases with the fuzziness of policies and the amount of evaluation and judgement the RIPE NCC has to apply to individual cases. I think this is fairly accurate, but since this is not coming from the authoritative source I may have made minor mistakes in formulating the above. Regards, - Havard