Hi Jamie, I can see your points here. I believe that in this economy you've hit the nail on the head. If this policy were enacted in NZ, it would only serve to create an increase in the number of single homed end sites. I don't necessarily have a current opinion on the proposal, but I'd like to present two pieces of aspects from people who seem to support the proposal. 1) This proposal lowers the barrier to organisations being able to become APNIC members and get their own IP addresses. IPv4 addresses are running out (big shock to only Rip Van Winkle). ISPs won't give you a /24 as a corporate anymore. In NZ we don't seem to be feeling this as much as other economies. Maybe thats because the large providers still have stock piles. In economies which are either late to the Internet party, have massive growth, or both, this shortage is being felt a lot more. Enterprises, whom historically would have been a single homed network of a single ISP, are being encouraged to contact APNIC directly so that they can get their own resources. I've said "No Sympathy, just adopt IPv6" in the past, but people want what they want. =( Removing the requirement for multihoming allows them to do this without having to incur any possible cost of joining two networks (even when one of them might be an IXP). This seems to be popular with large providers as it means they can encourage their customers to contact APNIC without also effectively making them find a competitor to also peer with. It also seems to be popular among IP Brokers as it increases their target market size. 2) There are some economies within the region where being a serial single homer is the way to play the game. I don't want to get into justifying this, but it's something that we don't really see here and I thought I'd just make sure people were aware of it. Situation as follows: I'm a small enterprise who buys my tubes from ISP 'A'. I can only afford to get a connection from one ISP. Having two in my economy would be cost prohibitive. The ISP give me an a small range of IP addresses (or even a single address) which I use to host my services on. ISP 'B' approaches me with a good deal on price. I can't change away from ISP 'A' however without having to renumber =( This is too much work so it never happens. What I'd like to do is to be able to have my own AS number and IP resources so that I can change ISP whenever one offers me a better deal. I'd like to do this every month if I wanted to. Now I've heard this from a number of organisations across a number of economies in the region. I've raised concerns about the practice making BGP less stable, but people seem to not care that much. It's not something that we'd see being a problem here. An enterprise wouldn't swap from Spark to Voda every other month because they were undercutting each other, but that IS what happens in some of the faster growing economies. Again - I don't want to come out with an opinion either way. Just to say that there are organisations in other economies who seem to want to use this (and other proposals) in ways which in which it's unlikely we'd see in a large way in NZ. Are they right? Who knows. Dean On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 11:41 PM, Jamie Baddeley <jamie.baddeley(a)vpc.co.nz> wrote:
Folks,
Saw this: https://www.apnic.net/policy/proposals/prop-114
Whilst the proposal does its best to outline pros and cons, I feel that from a policy perspective it removes the direct incentive to establish interconnectivity with IXP's (or some other mechanism for Multihoming). You gain an ASN but you are not compelled to increase the resilience of the Internet. To me that is a disadvantage that has not been stated. To me, having a network with an ASN means fundamentally you are participating in the mesh.
On the solution:
An organisation is eligible for an ASN assignment if:
- they are currently multi-homed, OR
- have previous allocated provider independent address space by APNIC, AND intend to multi-home in the future
It seems to suggest a policy tilted towards incumbents or those who've been around long enough to have some PI space?
The problem statement:
The policy seems to imply that both requirements i.e. multi-homing and clearly defined single routing policy must be met simultaneously, this has created much confusion in interpreting the policy.
Suggests that removing the confusing or conflicting elements of the current policy is wise, but I'm not convinced the proposed solution does that without undermining what I think is a important characteristic of the Internet which is a highly interconnected mesh.
As an alternate, is it not better to strengthen the process to determine whether the applicant did indeed multi-home? There are downsides in that of course. It does place overhead on an entity to test that but what matters more? Ease of access into the ASN club or ensuring high levels of interconnectivity?
What do others think?
jamie
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