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I can understand the people here complaining about how it's "difficult" to get an ARIN ASN. But you don't really need an ASN unless you intend to be an ISP. If

I can understand the people here complaining about how it's "difficult" to get an ARIN ASN. But you don't really need an ASN unless you intend to be an ISP. If you want to be serious about having and using an ASN for its intended purpose, you're looking at a minimum of a couple hundred dollars a month anyways for a 1U system in colocation with a hosting company that will set up a router-to-router BGP relationship with you. Even if to start, just singlehomed to one IP transit provider sending you full tables. And ideally also a connection to an IX that exists at the same location. In US dollars, budget something like $2400-3000 a year to be serious about it what I described above... The ARIN minimum bar to meet is actually not that high - you need to register an LLC or the local equivalent in your state or province, though of course something like a C-corp is perfectly acceptable as well. Other corporate legal entities like a US state's 501c3 or a Canadian non-profit society or registered charity are also acceptable. They are not set up for individual persons to get an ASN. One of the main purposes of having an ASN is to be truly multihomed, to 2 or more transit providers sending you full BGP tables, and you announce your own IP space to your upstream(s), as small as at least one /24 of ipv4, and whatever size you have for ipv6 such as a /32, or /36 or /48, and to join peering exchanges. The number of individual persons who really need to have a BGP-to-BGP full tables relationship with more than 1 ISP are really small. If you need such a thing you are almost certainly some sort of corporate entity (see above) and doing the ARIN membership joining paperwork should be very straightforward.

rahimnathwani 5y ago
What if you have two separate ISPs at home (for redundancy) but want your home devices to have stable IP addresses? Couldn't you achieve this with a simpler/cheaper setup (a single Vultr server set up with their BGP service), and your home devices tunneling everything through it? And doesn't this use case warrant your own address space?
- walrus01 5y ago
  Residential last mile ISPs are highly unlikely to offer bgp as a service. What you'll get is default route DIA. If you actually do find a cooperative fiber based last mile ISP that will set up bgp with you in your house, I'd be shocked if the service quotation for such a custom weird thing doesn't start from a floor price of $400 a month.
  - icedchai 5y ago
    Yep. And the cable company isn't going to let you do BGP over DOCSIS, that's for sure. Backhaul over tunnels is really the only viable solution to "BGP at home."
wahern 5y ago
> budget something like $2400-3000 a year to be serious about it what I described above... Companies like Vultr can provide cheap BGP services (free in the case of Vultr) which can be combined with cheap VPS instances as gateways that back-haul your subnet to a home or office server. This type of setup is mentioned down thread. You could easily end up paying more in ARIN fees than infrastructure costs. > One of the main purposes of having an ASN is to be truly multihomed For me the main interest in having my own ASN is IP portability across hosting providers. Unfortunately, IP reputation is a thing, especially for e-mail. If I had a portable subnet I wouldn't need to sweat how and where I host my infrastructure. In my case, I could change my office ISP from Cogent to AT&T without worrying about losing e-mail. EDIT: I'm probably overblowing the risk of being blocked by GMail, Office365, etc, after an IP migration. Don't let me dissuade any aspiring SMTP admins. Nonetheless, my overarching concern is maintaining control of my digital presence (personal and business), no matter how hard Google, Amazon, and others try to squeeze all the small players out of the space.

rahimnathwani 5y ago

What if you have two separate ISPs at home (for redundancy) but want your home devices to have stable IP addresses? Couldn't you achieve this with a simpler/cheaper setup (a single Vultr server set up with their BGP service), and your home devices tunneling everything through it? And doesn't this use case warrant your own address space?

walrus01 5y ago
Residential last mile ISPs are highly unlikely to offer bgp as a service. What you'll get is default route DIA. If you actually do find a cooperative fiber based last mile ISP that will set up bgp with you in your house, I'd be shocked if the service quotation for such a custom weird thing doesn't start from a floor price of $400 a month.
- icedchai 5y ago
  Yep. And the cable company isn't going to let you do BGP over DOCSIS, that's for sure. Backhaul over tunnels is really the only viable solution to "BGP at home."

wahern 5y ago

> budget something like $2400-3000 a year to be serious about it what I described above... Companies like Vultr can provide cheap BGP services (free in the case of Vultr) which can be combined with cheap VPS instances as gateways that back-haul your subnet to a home or office server. This type of setup is mentioned down thread. You could easily end up paying more in ARIN fees than infrastructure costs. > One of the main purposes of having an ASN is to be truly multihomed For me the main interest in having my own ASN is IP portability across hosting providers. Unfortunately, IP reputation is a thing, especially for e-mail. If I had a portable subnet I wouldn't need to sweat how and where I host my infrastructure. In my case, I could change my office ISP from Cogent to AT&T without worrying about losing e-mail. EDIT: I'm probably overblowing the risk of being blocked by GMail, Office365, etc, after an IP migration. Don't let me dissuade any aspiring SMTP admins. Nonetheless, my overarching concern is maintaining control of my digital presence (personal and business), no matter how hard Google, Amazon, and others try to squeeze all the small players out of the space.