I have a small ISP customer who is not multi-homed, and is using about a /21 and a half of space, and is expanding. Their upstream is refusing to give them more space, so they wanted to get their own, and give back the space to the upstream, with the possible exception of a small block for their servers, which would be very difficult to renumber. We explained this all, and the response we got from ARIN was that we needed to have a full /20 from the upstream, at which time we could easily get a /20 of new space. In order to qualify for the immediate need, we would need to show need for the entire /20, of which we would need to fully utilize (renumber into) within 30 days. That is not even remotely possible.
Or, they could easily multihome and qualify at a much smaller threshold.
Unfortunately, this is prohibitively expensive. They are small rural telcos who are connected to a collective state-wide fiber network. Any second provider would could an order of magnitude (or more) more than what they have, and would likely be delivered over the same fiber network anyway.
The problem with this whole thing is that I have no less than 4 ISPs that are in almost the same boat.
Then propose a policy change to rectify it.
Noted, and planned :-) -Randy