On Fri, 26 Jan 1996 13:59:32 +0000 (GMT) you said:

Just to spend a few minutes thinking about it, what do the phone companies do ? They are the nearest thing with a large installed base that the Internet even begins to map onto. There are however some fundemental differences - primarily the fragmentation of Europe (which is not the case in the US).

We have a 2Mb line from London to Amsterdam which costs us very much the same as a T1 from London to Washington. As I understand it, this "milk them for all they are worth" pricing of the telcos applies to cross-border land lines in Europe also.

All this impacts very severely on the commercial decisions taken as to the routeing of traffic. I would much rather buy more lines to the US and let the traffics flow back to Europe then to just buy lines to Europe. Luckily, commercial concerns are not the only contraints within which we have to work.

What this has to do with RIPE allocation policies is beyond me. Everyone in the European realm suffers from extremely high tariffs. So what?

To wash some dirty laundry here, we as a provider have been trying to get new address space for our dial up customers from RIPE NCC for almost 6 months now. We allocate *each* dialup customer *1* IP address from a block and dynamically route them based on where they log in to the service (including RSN Amsterdam). The RIPE NCC has >effectively< refused us space because they believe that we should change the product we sell and use dynamic IP for dialups.

We are the largest dialup ISP in Europe. We are not the largest provider in Europe because we follow the rest of the ISPs like sheep, buying Ciscos and installing off the shelf terminal servers. We provide a product which our customers understand gives them *more* for their money. We do something different, and the customers like it. Tough fact of business life that.

You and hundreds of other companies approach RIPE with the same story of how big they are, how large their investors are, how their network is gonna take the world of the Internet by storm, and therefore they deserve a /16 or even a /15. If RIPE followed your logic, there would be no more address space left. Use dynamic IP like the rest of us. We all realize the drain of IP addresses and try our best to maximize the addresses. Why should you be different?

But this is all I have seen you do, therefore, how can I but believe that this is the case. Every private mail that has been sent to us as a company involves you acting as God and us as the grovelling peasants praying for a benidication of address space. I have all these mails in my various folders, as do you.

It all depends on your ego. You could just look at them as an organization assigned the tough role of making sure there are IP addresses available in 1999. You see it as God. A viewpoint based on your world view.

Why not. We are not a communist society are we ? Each individual member of RIPE have their own unique requirements in a commercial and academically challenging world. We have a USP (Unique Selling Point) of giving our paying customers there own IP address (OK - it is not unique, but close enough). We have built propretary technology that allows our users to use *any* of our dial in points and get the same service, with the same IP number etc etc, and as one of our primary USPs we cannot allow the RIPE NCC to try to change that.

IBM has 460 POPs in over 40 countries and uses dynamic IP addresses. I can be in London or NYC or Tel Aviv and still use my SLIP connection to read my mail wherever I am. Why should you have static IP addresses for something others can do the dynamic way and thereby conserve IP address space?

Peter Galbavy peter@demon.net

Hank Nussbacher Israel