Summary

  • Edwin Verheul of SURF and Elvis Daniel Velea coauthored RIPE proposal 2023-02, which changed the default temporary IPv4 assignment to a /24 while allowing smaller requests.
  • The rule, implemented on 31 July 2023, moved the 50% peak-use test to requests larger than /24 and gave qualifying research projects a routing-based path to a larger block.

Imagine planning a short-lived network and needing 127 IPv4 addresses at its busiest moment. Under the old RIPE rule, that number could justify a small temporary assignment. It could not justify half of a /24. Then came the awkward part: many networks filter routes more specific than /24. The address plan looked tidy on paper and might struggle to leave the room.

Edwin Verheul made that example at RIPE 86 in Rotterdam. He was speaking as a network engineer at SURF, the Dutch research and education network. The issue was narrow enough to sound like bookkeeping and large enough to ruin an experiment: an assigned block is little use to an internet-facing project if other networks decline to carry its route.

Verheul and Elvis Daniel Velea put the answer into policy proposal 2023-02. Its new section 3.3 makes /24 the default size for a temporary IPv4 assignment. An applicant can still ask for something smaller. For a block larger than /24, the 50% concurrent peak-utilisation test still applies. That is a change to the starting line, not a licence to order an address banquet for a two-device demo.

There is a second, carefully drawn door. Research that needs more than /24 for routing reasons can seek it without satisfying the ordinary utilisation test, provided the project's details are public when RIPE NCC registers the resources and its results will be public, free of charge and free of disclosure restrictions. The record thus trades extra address space for an inspectable research purpose. It does not promise that every /24 will propagate across every network; it gives a requester a more plausible block to announce.

The policy page records acceptance on 13 July 2023 and implementation on 31 July. The resulting RIPE-801 policy covers temporary purposes such as research, events and deployment tests. RIPE 86 minutes put this activity at roughly twenty assignments a year at the time. Small traffic, perhaps, but small traffic still needs a road. Verheul's contribution was to make the default address block fit the road that operators actually built.