Mark - I agree with you 100% that the Internic had adopted a policy of handing out longer prefixes than I had initially warned everyone Sprint would be refusing to accept from external neighbours. I also note that the Internic also had wording which pointed out the dangers of accepting this sort of prefix from them, right on its application form, which I reproduce below. I think that the InterNIC did its job of warning people of upcoming realities, and therefore its policies were not, in fact, in conflict with ours. 206/8 was specifically chosen, in fact, because no allocations had been made from it at the time. Now, I note that I have pointed out that we are willing to be flexible when it comes to /19s, but for the moment, the filter will reject anything longer than /18s in 206/8 to 239/8. In part this is because it gives me the opportunity to study who has gotten disconnected and how difficult it will be to reconnect them without doubling the number of prefixes we will see in 206/8, not to mention 207/8 to 239/8. You may call it direct engineering terrorism if you like. I call it a sound, planned, well-announced step to keep the maximum growth of the routing tables confined to the level at which technology exists to support them. My only (large) regret is that any long prefixes in 206/8 ever worked at all, principally due to an oversight in a reconfiguration of ICM AS 1800. I hate breaking things that were already working... To translate that sentence: "Maybe. Let's see how bad the mess is first." Sean. - -- from ftp://rs.internic.net/templates/internet-number-template.txt Due to technical and implementation constraints on the Internet routing system and the possibility of routing overload, certain policies may need to be enforced by the major transit providers in order to reduce the number of globally advertised routes. These potential policies may include setting limits on the size of CIDR prefixes added to the routing tables, filtering of non-aggregated routes, etc. Therefore, addresses obtained directly from the InterNIC (non-provider-based, also known as portable) are not guaranteed to be routable on the Internet. ^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^