Summary

  • ARIN's end-user IPv4 policy allowed a one-year supply while demanding 25% use within 30 days. Leif Sawyer and David Farmer shepherded the proposal to remove that immediate-use bullet.
  • David Huberman authored the proposal. ARIN's Board adopted it in May 2016; NRPM 2016.2 made it effective on 13 July 2016.

Day 30 had a stopwatch. The network had a construction schedule.

A network operator could justify enough IPv4 addresses for a year and still be measured against the first four weeks. Section 4.3.3 asked for at least 25% of the requested addresses to be in use within 30 days. The ARIN-2015-3 discussion pointed out how oddly that test sat beside a one-year forecast. Equipment has to arrive, be staged and be turned on. Customers arrive in clumps. Growth rarely obeys a neat monthly ruler.

David Huberman wrote the proposal. Leif Sawyer and David Farmer were the Advisory Council shepherds; Sawyer posted the draft and staff review to ARIN's policy list in September 2015. The proposed edit was small: remove the immediate-use bullet from end-user IPv4 policy. Its leverage came from timing. Once ARIN's free IPv4 pool had run out, many requests would be fulfilled by transfers under section 8.3. ARIN staff said removing the old test would align written policy with how it was already processing those transfers, with little operational disruption.

There were temptations to clean the whole room while opening one drawer. Staff spotted an obsolete RFC 2050 citation and another 25%-within-30-days clause elsewhere in the manual. The Council's assessment kept the immediate-use deletion in focus and left the wider cleanup for another round. The proposal was a precise correction to section 4.3.3's end-user test.

The Board adopted ARIN-2015-3 on 20 May 2016. ARIN put the change into effect with NRPM 2016.2 on 13 July. A twelve-month plan could now be assessed as a twelve-month plan, without an extra sprint at the starting line. Sawyer's part was the policy shepherd's less glamorous craft: moving a sentence through review until the manual matched the work on the ground.

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