IPv4 Addresses Reserved for Critical Infrastructure
26/10/2016
During the Public Policy Forum held as part of the LACNIC 26 event in Costa Rica, the proposal to reserve a pool of IPv4 addresses for infrastructure considered to be critical or essential to the operation of the Internet in the region reached consensus among the Latin American and Caribbean Internet community.
This policy modification was promoted by Edmundo Cazarez Lopez of NIC Mexico, who also incorporated comments and suggestions received via the Policy mailing list, and seeks to create an IPv4 reserve pool equivalent to a /15 (128,000 addresses) that will survive the termination of the reserves for IPv4 exhaustion. This reserve will be used to satisfy requests for addresses that will be used to deploy infrastructure considered critical or essential for the operation of the Internet in the region once the space reserved for Phase 3 is exhausted.
According to the consensus reached during LACNIC 26, the 128,000 addresses for the reserve pool proposed by Cazarez Lopez will be prepared once the new policy is ratified by the LACNIC Board. After receiving support at the Public Forum and on the Policy mailing list, this proposal is now in the 45-day last call for comments period, which will close on 12 November.
Cazarez Lopez noted that his proposal sought to create a reserve that would survive IPv4 exhaustion, and that its intention was to make it easier to assign addresses for the deployment of critical infrastructure once there is no more available space.
Addresses from this special IPv4 reserve for critical Internet infrastructure will begin to be assigned once the space reserved for Phase 3 of the regional IPv4 exhaustion plan runs out (recent projections anticipate this will happen during the first half of 2017).
Under this policy, address requests for critical infrastructure may be submitted at any time, but the maximum assignment size will be limited to a minimum of a /24 and a maximum of a /22. The size of these assignments will be subject to verified use and an analysis by LACNIC or by the corresponding NIR. Likewise, addresses assigned under this section must be returned to LACNIC or to the corresponding NIR once they are no longer needed for the purpose for which they were originally requested.
The policy also clearly states that addresses assigned from this reserve may not be used for a purpose other than that which originated the request.
Click here to watch the presentation by Edmundo Cazarez at the Public Policy Forum: http://bit.ly/2e3rtSh
Click here to subscribe to the Policy mailing list: http://www.lacnic.net/lists/policy