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routed EITHER we cannot change NSP OR I am talking about several hundred customers to appease if the routing is withdrawn ...given that most customers will not quite understand a message telling them to "reconfigure the IP settings of their software or fail to connect".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 --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog