At 11:58 AM 11/7/98 -0600, Phil Howard wrote:
I don't think arin would object to you giving out static ip's to those of your users who specifically requst this service. ARIN will object if you want to assign a static ip every win95 Dialup person who justs uses the net to surf and check his mail.
Unless you are @home who they have permitted to assign all of their users static IPs.
I wonder if @home has sufficiently proven that it is necessary to actually give out static IPs to cable modem subscribers. Considering that DHCP is there, I would have my doubts.
The modem is connected 24x7. What is the purpose of Dynamic vs. Static *ASIDE FROM MAKING RENUMBERING EASIER*.
Regardless of how the market gets sliced up to little providers or going all to a few big ones, issuing static IPs one to a household in North America alone is going to eat a huge chunk of address space by the time the world is all wired up. There better have been some kind of requirement that the space they got can be static for now, but has to become dynamic in the future as they expand, such as by getting no more space until they show that the peak number of addresses in concurrent use warrants the increase.
That's the point - with @Home a static address IS concurrently in use. You get your cable modem and its up, period. Caveat - I'm discussing 2-way 24x7 @home customers. There are markets where the service is 1-way, I believe, and in THOSE markets, dynamic addressing makes more sense, because they're NOT all up 24x7 (if they are, the Cable-ISP's modem pool is going to get large)
Once concern I have with so many static IPs in use is how do they grow their network and keep the routes aggregated? If one area has a /24 and grows to need more, do you give it an arbitrary 2nd /24 or make it a /23? Are there going to be hundreds of small announcements from them or just a few or one? At least with dynamic (e.g. DHCP) you can renumber a whole area relatively easily and keep it aggregated.
That's one advantage of DHCP vs. static, BUT it isn't a technical issue that ARIN needs to concern itself with in regard to address space allocation, its simply an issue internally as how (not) to piss off your customers. D