What are the implications of address allocation in the Internet?
Curtis believes that address lending is bad for the Internet.
Randy says that reliability is really why people want to multihome. What about reachability? Getting connecting to two large providers gives the ISP alot of control over their own reachability.
Most customers who want to multihome do not know what they are getting into. They do not filter adequately and do not advertise correctly. This means that the ISP is often stuck with the responsibility with educating the customer on programming their routers, use of the IRR and frequently having to do the same for the other ISPs staff. He proposes that two charges should be imposed. One for engineering time for education and one for the additional time the NOC has to take in debugging problems.
Avi Freedman advocates the recommendation of consultants to customers who want to multihome to deal with the education issue.
However, how to people feel about injecting more specific routes into the Internet so that a multi-homing customer using provider provided space from both the source of the address space provider (where there is already an aggregate advertisement) and the other provider? Generally, this should be done.
There seems to be a conflict invoving aggregation with advertising more specifics routes. Curtis says that doing the specific advertisements is fine, but such specifics should be aggregated as much as possible when possible.
Multihoming is happening and will continue. We need to accommodate it more.
Are provider independent addresses bad? If you have a single prefix, it is subject to dapening. The real key is to keep the that prefix from dampening. When you are part of a larger block, then that block will not be dampened as easily.
Randy would like to see a report from Merit that indicates which prefixes are multi-homed. Brian from Merit says they will do it.
Rob Libshutz suggests that cooperative providers could offer these as services. Avi suggests that is not a good idea.
SprintLink has changed its policy with respect to multihoming. It will now accept multi-home customers and advertise their blocks (even if they are /24).
What about creating some address space that is specifically for multi-home users? Curtis suggests that folks should do this by not accepting prefixes that are not in the IRR.