Hi all,
Having read (most of) the feedback, Aftab and I will be putting a new version out probably either late Sunday or Early Monday. I am at Haneda Airport flying to Fukuoka now and Aftab arrives in Tokyo and I believe will be arriving tomorrow morning. Once
we've had time to confer, we will issue new wording.
The object of this policy is to remove the need to be multi-homed to get your
initial ASN. It is not designed to hand out ASN's like candy, not provide them to people who have no intention of multi-homing.
It is designed for those who wish to announce their portable ranges via their own ASN using whatever routing policy they determine to be appropriate for the operation of their network, but removing the requirement to be immediately multi-homed, but having
the intention to multi-home at some point (the timeframe should not be mandated) - whether that be permanently or not is not relevant.
Any subsequent allocations would fall under the same criteria, plus the extra burden of justification by the secretariat to justify additional ASN's.
The wording will be based around the above.
The cases for this policy are numerous and the reasons Aftab and I are doing this together is to address several of them.
- Entities not meeting the multi-homing criteria due to economic circumstances, regional access, etc.
- Smaller entities, such as businesses with portable address space that would like more control and flexibility over how they announce their networks, and plan for multi-homing either as a future facility or for cloud/elastic on demand purposes.
The major use case from my perspective is:
- Due to IP runout (ISPs having less and charging more), and some requirements for being portable, I am assisting
many businesses become APNIC members and their own address space. Many of these initially are not multi-homed, but are planning to in the short period as they consider the elastic infrastructure available to them over new initiatives like Megaport and
others - where layer 2, BGP to many 'service' providers is the new way of doing business. I did a presentation on Megaport and Elastic X-Connect Fabrics at the last APNIC in Brisbane for those who saw it.
In Australia (and I am sure other places too), there is the new concept of opportunistic capacity - being able to buy transit on an as-needs basis for any determined time period... 1 week, 1 day, even hourly. An operator might be single homed, but may
wish to bring on elastic/On Demand transit capacity for short periods of time - at which point the would be multi-homed, but then disconnect and then be single-homed again.
Megaport is across Australia ,Singapore, Hong Kong, New Zealand and heading for the US and Europe - as well as other elastic fabrics such as Pacnet's PEN, Equinix Cloud Exchange, IX Australia and others coming. This way of doing business will be commonplace
for businesses in certain regions rapidly over 2015 - especially as
To cater for this explosion in elastic fabrics and marketplaces that serve them, the policy framework has to facilitate a smooth way of doing this new 'cloud' kind of business - without businesses having to 'fudge the truth' to get thr required resources.
APNIC has ability to do rapid memberships within a very short period (1 day) with address space and ASN's up and running very quickly.
This is the key reason for my proposed change to policies 113 and 114, as well as supporting Aftabs motivations on assisting smaller providers in regional areas, or economically challenged locations where multi-homing is not as easy as it might be elsewhere,
prepare their networks to participate in being multi-homed for the standard reasons.
If you have any comments about this, or have any advice on wording, restrictions, we would love to hear from you by tomorrow PM so we can consider your thoughts and also any perceived problems with the policy and (preferably) with ways to meet the need,
but deal with any potential abuse.
Thanks.