Summary

  • Bill Darte moved ARIN's Advisory Council in November 2001 to recognize a multihomed downstream customer's need for one /24, even when its host count did not meet the ordinary utilization test.
  • The Board sent unclear wording back to staff in December, ratified a clarified version in January 2002, and ARIN lists the policy as implemented that year.

A customer can have ten machines and two upstream providers. The host spreadsheet looks tiny; the routing problem does not. In 2001, ARIN's normal reassignment test asked for immediate use of 25% of the addresses and a plan to use 50% within a year. That arithmetic made sense for many ordinary assignments. It was a poor way to price the shape of a multihomed connection. Bill Darte brought a simpler question to the Advisory Council: is the customer actually connected to more than one provider?

The 9 November 2001 Council minutes record Darte moving language that let multihoming justify a /24 from an upstream ISP regardless of host requirements. Barbara Roseman seconded it; the Council voted unanimously and directed staff to issue a last call. This was a recommendation in an open policy process, not Darte issuing addresses from his own desk. The proposed exception carried strings: the customer had to give contact details for its upstream providers, and it could take a /24 from only one of them without further justification. Two pipes did not become two automatic /24s.

The Board then made the policy do another lap. Its 11 December minutes say trustees found the wording unclear and asked staff to rewrite it. They described the revision as non-substantive, so the proposal did not have to start the whole evaluation process again. At the 22 January 2002 meeting, the Board unanimously ratified clearer text, subject to a courtesy review by the Council. The revised text put the routine 25% and 50% host tests beside the multihoming exception. It assigned verification to the upstream ISP and let that ISP show ARIN either the collected provider information or the customer's ASN when ARIN later reviewed the ISP's own utilization.

ARIN's archived Policy 2001-2 records adoption and implementation in 2002. It is a compact piece of institutional engineering. An operating fact displaced a bad proxy, while the verification and one-provider limit kept the exception bounded. The public archive does not count how many customers used it or what happened to routing tables. Its achievement is visible in the text itself: the rule learned to distinguish an address request from a host-count contest.