On Fri, 26 Jan 1996 14:03:19 -0000 you said:

But still, sorry that it wasn't as smooth as it could have been if there hadn't been a flaw in the filtering that crept in in about April, long before anyone was even really thinking of allocating from 206.0.0.0/8.

However, as I think everyone remembers, after a short while, in an effort to assist in getting aggregation of the then-announced bits of 206.0.0.0/8 working OK and giving people some time to get used to the filtering, I did relax the filtering on 206.0.0.0/8 to permit /19s.

As you note, this was to the benefit of other peoples' customers.

| the real message is if you have a 206+ address, make sure that your | provider can put it into an aggregation block for you (or go to sprint).

Right, and we have been warning our customer base for some time that if they announce a 206+ address that is not aggregatable into something reasonably big (like a /18), they run the risk of losing connectivity to other providers if they ever were to impose similar filters for business or technical reasons.

Lets take a real world example between Sean's and Daniel's arguments. I am the registry of Last Resort for Israel and I assign CIDR blocks to ISPs here in Israel. I follow the slow start model of RIPE and give initially a /22 and then a /21 and then a /20, etc. One new ISP in Israel wanted more address space and found that Net99 (all ISPs have to connect to an ISP in the USA due to Israeli gov't regulations) would give it a /21 from 206.161.0.0 and later Agis gave it a /19 from 206.249.0.0. So we have now an ISP that circumvented the allocation policies and went to the USA to get cheap, large blocks at possibly an expense of them not being portable and/or not routable even if it is portable in the future. The smaller, new ISPs that don't know even what questions to ask will get stuck more and more by this type of situation. We can't do anything about that. But we do need a better GLOBAL policy for IP address allocation that everyone adheres to (perhaps I am asking for utopia).

Sean.

Hank Nussbacher