Yes, well there is no other way of doing it. The days of starting a ISP out of your house and in a few years be a Sprint is falling away. ISP's will just need to get space from there upstream provider and renumber.
Yes
How many times is it reasonable to ask a customer to renumber? Once is certainly reasonable. Twice is questionable. More than that and I would suspect the customer would renumber all right, but as part of shifting to a different ISP.
Please tell me how this could happen? I would call this poor planning on the part of the ISP. Simply request network space from your provider until you can justify say a /18-16...(if you get a /18, request that the rest of the /16 is reserved for you and BACK IT UP with documentation) by noting that you will return ALL of your provider assigned networks within X amount of time of recieving the delegation from the NIC. This is 1 renumbering. (Not including switching providers if you so choose...a cost of doing business that you must accept if it's your choice..although I'll stick my neck out and say this should happen early when it is least painful...you can usually tell if you want to leave an provider early on) Any NSP that cannot allocate to you at least a /19 worth of networks (IF YOU CAN JUSTIFY IT) is not worth using for an ISP who thinks they need globally routable address space that they can advertise wherever they want sometime in the near future. If you aren't going to get to that point...what's the damn problem?
As many as it takes, This is just something you are going to need to deal with. We started with small blocks and had to renumber several times so far. It is just part of growing, until you are a large NSP connected to all the NAPs you will just need to start will small blocks and renumber over and over until you get /18 or smaller.
Granted...back then...renumbering wasn't something you thought about... you just had the provider release a network if you left...but nowdays, if you plan for it, it'll be less painful...what a concept.
This strikes me as being discriminatory against the smaller ISPs. The customers are looking for stability and, from their point of view, being forced to renumber several times along with the ISP is unstable and costly. They'll look to ISPs who will not force them to renumber, the ones with a /18 or smaller already.
See above...if your customers know how to make it easier, it will be easier. rfc1918, proxie firewalls, NAT gateways, DHCP, dynamic ppp, etc. I maintain that the word several is unlikely (based on an ISP starting up now and actually planning...perhaps an overzealous assumption)
Do you truly believe there is no way to avoid the forced renumbering problem for the smaller ISPs?
-David
There is an alternative to forced renumbering. Do it voluntarily at your time based on the schedule of your planning. Then it's not a problem...it's a fact of doing business that you are taking control of. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Andrew Smith ** awsmith@neosoft.com ** Network Operations ** (713) 968-5800 ** "The best way to predict the future is to invent it" - Alan Kay ** ** http://www.neosoft.com/neosoft/staff/andrew ** ---------------------------------------------------------------------------