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Re: ARIN IP allocation question

  • From: Robert Tarrall
  • Date: Thu Jun 27 15:38:10 2002

"Jeff Nelson" wrote:
-> Small ISP or no, how far off are you from begin multi-homed? Growing pains

Pretty far off.  The reason we went with Viawest is that we're colo-ed
in a very good facility (Level3's colo in downtown Denver) and Viawest
is multi-homed through TouchAmerica, Level3, and Internap.  Internap are
themselves of course very well interconnected locally.

Doing multihoming in-house wouldn't necessarily improve reliability;
it'd just shift the failure point from Viawest's router to our own,
meaning much more $$$ worth of router here and much more administrative
load for me.  I really doubt I can do a better job of running BGP than
Internap, or even Viawest.

-> leasing from ARIN is best for you. If you see continued growth, I would make
-> the plunge and revel in the discoveries.

Yup.  Right now we've got a nice, steady, maintainable growth rate;
unless our business model changes it'll be years before we need a /21.
In reality a large and obvious "sea change" in the ISP business or in
our business model would precede any need for a big block of addresses
here.  If things look like they're changing (or if it looks like Viawest
and Level3 are both going under) I'll definitely be talking with ARIN;
until then there should be no need.

-> You can be allocated blocks from ARIN in a 2-3 week period of time; another
-> provider bringing you a DS-3 (or whatever) could take 6+ depending on your
-> location.

One of the nice things about the Level3 colo (or any large colo, really)
is that the slowest part of adding a DS-3 is the cross-connect.  We got
a DS-3 from XO a while back and XO's end was done in about 5 days.  Took
3-4 weeks for Level3 to run the cross-connect, of course.

                       -Robert Tarrall.-
                       Unix System/Network Admin
                       E.Central/Neighborhood Link