Summary

  • ARIN staff gave a concrete waiting-list example: four noncontiguous /24 blocks are available, an organization qualifies for a /22 but will accept as little as a /24, and ARIN issues one /24 before removing that request from the list.
  • The organization has received a block it agreed to accept. The policy question is whether one contiguous allocation should remain the only way to satisfy a request when addresses are assembled from recovered inventory.

A box contains four puzzle pieces. Together they have the right number of squares; none of their edges meet. That is the IPv4 waiting-list problem ARIN brought to its 22 October meeting. Chief Experience Officer John Sweeting’s Policy Implementation and Experience Report uses exactly four noncontiguous /24 blocks as its example. One applicant has justified a /22, which contains four times as many addresses as a /24, but has listed /24 as its acceptable minimum. ARIN can issue one /24. The request is then gone from the queue.

There is a policy reason for the result. NRPM section 4.1.8.2 says waiting-list requests will not be partially filled. Section 4.1.6 calls for allocations and assignments as a single continuous range. ARIN treats the applicant's declared minimum as a complete acceptable fulfillment, rather than making a series of small allocations toward the originally justified maximum. Under those two rules, the other three separated /24s cannot be joined on the same ticket. The report does not say they disappear; they remain separate inventory whose eventual distribution depends on other requests and available sizes.

ARIN's public waiting-list guide explains the bargain an applicant signs up to: qualify for no more than a /22, choose the smallest size it will accept, and leave the list after any waiting-list or specified-recipient transfer receipt. A fulfilled organization normally must wait 90 days before asking for more. Position in line is no simple promise of service; ARIN says block size and availability govern the actual order of fulfillment. It reports the next distribution for about 4 January 2027. Its 7 October notice says 483 requests were filled from 577 blocks, though those totals reveal nothing about the number of applicants affected by the one-block restriction.

Sweeting asks whether the restriction on multiple blocks is still necessary, whether aggregation should continue to govern waiting-list fulfillment, and whether issuing blocks above /24 is worth serving fewer organizations. Those are three different choices. Removing the one-block rule might help a network that can actually operate several prefixes; keeping larger contiguous blocks might help another network avoid the cost of fragmented routing. The published report opens that argument. It records no approved policy change.