Summary

  • LACNIC’s current policy manual gives a recipient three months to announce IPv4 resources, twelve for IPv6 and six for ASN resources, unless the need not to announce is justified.
  • The same clause says LACNIC and national registries do not guarantee routability. Recipients negotiate that with connectivity providers; a recorded allocation and a working path are separate deliverables.

The clock starts in a database. The route starts at a network edge. LACNIC’s policy manual puts those two events in the same paragraph and assigns the risk between different people.

Section 1.6 of the authoritative Spanish manual gives three deadlines: three months for IPv4, twelve for IPv6 and six for an autonomous system number. The recipient may justify a need not to announce. In the same section, LACNIC and the national Internet registries decline to guarantee that allocated or assigned addresses will be routable. The recipient must negotiate reachability with connectivity providers. LACNIC offers guidance when necessary and commits regional registries to procedures that reduce fragmentation risk.

Each deadline measures a different kind of resource. The registry can record who holds it and set the terms of its use. An operator can configure an origin and ask an upstream to carry a prefix. Other networks decide what they accept and pass onward. LACNIC’s own BGP training account describes routing as neighbors learning announcements, with peering, filters and transit in the path. A registry entry cannot configure every neighbor’s filter.

Imagine an end user receiving provider-independent IPv4 space. The manual itself says such addresses are not guaranteed to be globally routable and advises the recipient to contact its Internet provider. The user can have a clean allocation record, a business plan and a three-month deadline. The missing piece is an upstream arrangement that carries the route. If the prefix appears at one observation point, that is useful evidence of an announcement. It does not establish that every customer path works.

The three deadlines make the split sharper. IPv4 gets the shortest runway; IPv6 gets a year; ASN use has six months. The old, uniform 90-day text remains visible in LACNIC’s policy-history record. It is history. Version 2.21 is the current manual, and its Spanish PDF controls where translations disagree. Quoting the old line as today’s rule would put an IPv6 operator on the wrong clock by nine months.

A deadline without a specified proof of outcome also invites confusion. Was a route configured at the origin? Accepted by the first provider? Visible from several networks? Able to deliver traffic in both directions? Those are different tests. The published clause states an announcement duty and a justified exception; it does not publish a universal reachability test or a case-by-case enforcement count. A public record tying each deadline to the test used, the exception granted and the upstream evidence would change that assessment.

The practical handoff is simple enough to document. Record the allocation and its date. Record the provider agreement and origin configuration. Record where and when the prefix was observed, and retain the filters or rejection messages if a provider declines it. An operator facing a broken service can then find the responsible desk instead of being told, correctly but uselessly, that the number is in the database.

Sources: LACNIC Policy Manual v2.21, Spanish original, official English edition, LAC-2022-1 policy history, and LACNIC routing tutorial.