Dear Mr. Fort, Thank you very much for your help! But there are cases the ISPs are providing connectivity, albeit the address block of the customer was not obtained from the provider. For example, my university use Cable and Wireless as the commercial provider but our address was not assigned by C&W. In such as case, is the interface addresses at both ends of the interdomain link also assigned by the larger ISP? Sincerely Teng On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, Andrew Fort wrote:
Hi Teng, Every ISP I've worked at (3), and every ISP I've purchased service from (4), allocates link addressing (/30s) from its own pools, rather than making the customer provide the link addressing. (These parties are all in Australia, if that matters).
As I understand it, this is 'the convention' (you purchase a service, the provider definately has addresses, so it has them to provide).
The matter is less clear with private peering agreements, as both parties are generally ISPs and have address space of their own which could be used.
In the cases I've been involved in, one party has decided to use its own space (maybe due to their IGP design, but either way it'll work), which happens to have been the larger party in every case (don't know if that's by design or logic of the method of agreement).
Subject: About the address allocation convention between ISPs From: Teng Fei <tfei@ipanema.ecs.umass.edu> Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2003 01:10:33 +0000 (UTC) To: <nanog@merit.edu>
Hello everyone,
I have a question about the convention of address allocation between ISPs. If a smaller ISP tries to establish connection with its provider, does this small ISP configure one of the interface on its boarder router using an IP address obtained from the provider, or it is the other way around, that is, the provider uses one of the IP address belongs to the customer to configure the provider's boarder router?
I have this question because I am trying to identify the link between two organizations from traceroute measurements. How the addresses are allocated will affect the identification of the inter-domain link by exactly one hop.
I am not sure if there is such a convention at all, or the address assignment is randomly decided according to the agreement between the customer and the provider?
Since I know there are many seasoned network professionals on this mailing list, I think it might be a proper question to ask here. Would anyone kindly be willing to share your experience? Thank you very much!
Sincerely
Teng