Dear Colleagues, Over 2002 the RIPE NCC has worked to improve the quality of Registration Services. Notable improvements, additions and changes include: - Response times to new tickets have improved dramatically, being answered within one working day. Since September the time taken to a first response has never risen above two working days. This is despite a record high number of tickets being received in October 2002. - The LIR WG approved new policy documents. The new structure makes documents easier to read and maintain. We will continue efforts to make policy documents clearer. - The common IPv6 policy has been implemented and we have made 76 new allocations under it. - The LIR WG reviewed the ASN assignment policy immediately before and during RIPE 43 in Rhodes. No major changes were made. - The RIPE NCC worked with Gert Döring to analyse issues that need to be addressed in a proposal for a sub-allocation policy. Gert's proposal was accepted and a draft document is now under review by the LIR WG. <http://www.ripe.net/ripe/draft-documents/sub-allocations.html> - New LIRs can now take up membership much faster than in the past. The procedure has been streamlined and better documented. - Attendees at RIPE 43 in Rhodes have tested a new way to access RIPE NCC services. The "LIR Portal" was launched today as an official service and is accessible to all members. - A policy allowing temporary assignments of Internet resources for Internet experiments has been implemented. The policy wording will be incorporated into the IPv4, IPv6 and ASN policy documents. This is in addition to the existing procedure for temporary assignments to conferences and trade fairs. - We have completed the transfer of ASN registrations from the ARIN Database to the RIPE Database and have run a trial for the transfer of IPv4 registrations. In addition to this work we have plans to improve the quality of the RIPE NCC's Registration Services over 2003: - The "Hostmaster Robot" will be replaced with a new system that will handle a revised set of simpler forms. - We are reviewing the status attribute values for inetnum objects in the RIPE Database. - An improved tool to replace "asused_public" will be released soon. - A formal explanation of the system used to determine Assignment Windows will be published. - Customer service will be improved by having Hostmasters call customers to resolve difficult or complex requests more quickly. Kind regards, -- leo vegoda RIPE NCC Registration Services