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Are you saying that Sprint refused to allocate the space you required? That last sentence is based on an assumption not a known fact.

?? It was a question.

Sprint wanted nothing to do with it, and referred to the Internic. I even asked for a part of a now-aggregated-but-already-fragmented-hence- soon-more-fragmented larger aggregate (which makes the most sensee). No dice with Sprint.

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I think the real problem here is that Kazakhstan should have a block of addresses with a short enough prefix to guarantee routing and these addresses should have been allocated out of this block.

No. Political geography has little to do with the topology of the Internet, thus allocating to a country doesn't correspond to topological addressing. One might argue that a service provider in Kazakhstan should have a short prefix, but a similar argument can be made for any service provider.

I can definitely not justify a /18 right now, a /20 for sure, and I would already be the largest owner of IP space with that.

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The obvious solution to this immediate problem is to guarantee routing for the long prefix until the event in Kazakhstan is over and then to think hard about what to do about similar cases that are not for short term events.

I specifically requested this allocation (for a mere /20 to satisfy the slow-start policy) as permanent, not as a recyclable temporary assignment. While it's used for one particular purpose during next week, the assignment was due for real, customer use after the event.

Right, except you can *never* guarantee routing -- it is a cooperative effort among service providers and some service providers may choose not to cooperate. However, the organization wishing to have the long prefix routed may pay the routing service provider(s) extra for the special handling necessary to insure the highest probability of routability to the sites the organization wants to reach. But this gets somewhat complicated. I would think an easier solution would be to simply get a block from the upstream ISP...

Everything I ever tried...and non-cooperation out of political motives (that's an accusation,actually) is something new on the internet, at least on the routing level between NSPs. tiny.sprintlink.net was down most of the day, not taking mail. Sean should have taken notice by now... --- Kai Schlichting Internet Project Manager, BelCom, Inc. 515 Madison Ave Suite 2100 NY,NY 10022 212-705-9500 (voice) 212-755-0864 (fax) kai@belcom.net Ask us about Internet service in the CIS! Bringing Internet, where there is none (phones still down due to office move until Oct. 1st)