Peter,
--------- Text sent by Peter Dawe follows:
Demon Internet Services provide an IP address for every dial-up customer. Most other ISPs have taken the view that this is a waste of valuable IP space and allocate IP addresses dynamically.
How should our industry respond to ISPs who behave selfishly and do not take into account the good of the network?
Peter Dawe Unipalm PIPEX
1. Speaking as IAB chair, I must state that the IAB has absolutely no role to play in answering your question. Operational/commercial issues are outside our mandate, whatever we might feel.
2. However, even without an IAB discussion, I can tell you that we are in favour of technology that conserves address space and facilitates renumbering.
Regards, Brian Carpenter (IAB Chair) (brian@dxcoms.cern.ch) voice +41 22 767 4967, fax +41 22 767 7155
I would like to raise concerns regarding the guidelines used by the InterNIC for allocating addresses. Some of the current guidelines seem oblivious of emerging market realities and often times highly non-objective. I wish to see this issue addressed by someone, the iab or iana, or anyone else that sets forth, mandates or influences the policies used by the InterNIC. As a "small" web service provider that wants to continue to be multi-homed, I find the attitude that the use of static dialup addresses or in our perception of the InterNIC that the use of a single IP address to virtual host a .com domain is somehow wasteful to be questionable. I believe that such uses are in fact highly efficient. I have no grounds, and it makes no business sense, to tell a customer they cannot have a dedicated web server for their domain or get SMTP feed to their dialup client. The same registries, I have reasons to believe, tend to overlook allocations of several /16s to major corporations that are completely firewalled from the Internet and could very well use non-public addresses for thousands of internal machines. I used to work in one such corporation and have observed their historical use of IP addresses and new allocations. It is quite possible that the registries are on the forefront dealing with these issues with stretched resources and no body to turn to evolve the policies for the rapidly changing marketplace. I can then understand, and now it is my hope ;-), that being part of these aliases will automatically qualify me as a "caring" Internet citizen. The end result is we have to either learn to play the game so we will survive and continue to be independent. In the meanwhile, we continue to live on the edge fearing the day when a big chunk of the Internet drops our 206/19. Oh yes, we have already renumberd twice and the support costs are enormous. Thanks for listening this far, Sanjay.