Tena koe NZNOG,
My apology to tomorrow's meeting.
I am unable to be in Auckland at that time.
As I am unable to be there I do now want to contribute a note
on the matter of impacts created specifically for longer standing
ISPs where the routing of a single Class C subnet is altered
such that they have only ONE choice of NSP.
I do not believe that the meeting will be so foolhardy as to
agree to create a high level of disruption for my company and
others in similar situations as I anticipate that there is enough
awareness of the probable ramifications politically and legally.
It is obviously unwise to create a serious disruption or to
"be seen to limiting the basic commercial choice of an ISP to
purchase different upstream services".
However I think I should give you some detail of the type of impact there
would be at an older ISP (taken from what would happen at mine)
if NSP agreement is arrived at to act in this manner.
This is a helpful step towards giving the meeting full information.
Situation:
A well used Class C that is not part of larger block beholden to the ISP.
The Class C has been used rather fully for 5 years
Customer connections of the following kind operative under it:
Domestic and Business customers still operating statically configured
softwares from earlier days of setups. N.B. this significantly
predates the operations of entities like Xtra and Clearnet
and therefore there may be those connected to these operations who do
not have an appreciation of this dimension.
We are referring to
Older trumpet winsock,
older MacTCP,
Also however on the network concerned there are significant numbers of
customers operating
dialup masquerading/routing solutions that require a site visit and
some hours of work to alter,
dialup SMTPs that expect static allocation i.e.- to know their own
IP in advance of connecting.
So in the case of this operation if this class C is not independently routed
EITHER we cannot change NSP
OR I am talking about several hundred customers to appease if the routing is
withdrawn
...given that most customers will not quite understand a message telling them
to "reconfigure the IP settings of their software or fail to connect".
How do I deal with the consequent level of disruption compressed into a few hours?
One cannot.
If an ISP makes a monumental screw up such as in the Xtra password
debacle then they only have themselves to look to for how to cope with
the support impact. If however the cause is arguably from new policies
of NSPs imposed without agreement from the ISP and the result is scores of
businesses and many private users suddenly without connection -
.,. then this will be a very problematic situation even if both the ISP
and their customers had been given technical notice of a change.
So how can an ISP prepare when faced with the probability of this situation?
Obviously one can spend on and implement an IP translation setup for
all one's dialup traffic to be run through, or one can setup a separate dialup
zone and start to move customers who will not need the translation to dialling
that zone. Changing a phone number seems to be within customer reach
of comprehension and "self responsibility" given due notice. IP configurations
however are more often NOT viewed that way by the dialling public.. unfortunately.
The ISP end of the option to do translation for all or part of the
network is an elaborate commitment
and costly and doing it this way is not something that we would like to
see without seeing first that effort had been made practically, politically
and legally to avoid having to take such steps.
This is the extent of my thinking on emergency means to cope with a renumbering.
If someone out there has a technical solution I am not aware of then
please do share that here.
Most people who have actually heard us out on the sheer moment of
such changes in terms of hours and cost end up thinking more carefully
around the issues than before hearing such a description.
I strongly hope that this is true of the
majority attending tomorrow's meeting and advise the meeting that you should
be sure not to ignore the interests of long established ISPs. Their situation
is NOT to be compared with the impact of renumbering for some situation
like a law firm with 40 PCs. The additional impact for an ISP is that they
have multiple arrows of responsibility to customer situations where they
do not have much control. The business losses for an ISP can be quite
significant here and as for many of us the NSP supplier is also a competing ISP
os there would be quite a sting to the media tail that would emerge if
this matter is "forced" through mainly by the will of the NSP players.
In general I wish you a productive meeting where policies for
overall effectiveness of national route management are arrived at that set
new guidelines for new players.
Robert Hunt
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