In May 2024, I purchased a small fixed wireless ISP business in Central Maine. The prior owner had leased IP blocks from his upstream providers with few IP addresses requiring the use of NAT for customer internet service. I knew one goal was to get an IPv4 block assignment so I could have my own IP space to do what I needed for my customers and get rid of the costs associated with leasing IP blocks.
With a lot of work, I was able to get a new upstream provider and move into a datacenter in Portland where I had the new upstream provider install my DIA circuit. Being in this datacenter, I would have access to an IX giving me a second upstream path to the internet, i.e. multi-homed, which is one of the requirements to get an IP block assignment from ARIN.
I completed paperwork and paid ARIN the RSP administrative fee (I chose 2x-Small) to request an ASN. Once I had my ASN, I submitted a ticket to get an IPv6 /36 IP block assignment using the multi-homed ISP justification above. After receiving the IPv6 assignment, using the 4.10 rule, I submitted another ticket to ARIN to get an IPv4 /24 block. It took about two days to get the IPv4 assignment. I now had my own IP IPv4 and IPV6 block assignments. The last step was hiring a network engineer to assist with BGP and OSPF design and implementation.
He got to work setting up BGP announcements with my upstream provider. After multiple tickets with my upstream provider to get them to properly configure their equipment, we got the BGP session online. Once that was done, he designed an OSPF setup on my network and we figured out the best usage of the new IP assignments. He configured the routers on the network to hand out DHCP IP addresses to customers.
I talked with a colleague about the using geolocation services for the new IP block assignments. I wanted to be sure that my customers visiting websites and content providers would have a fairly accurate location of where their IP address originated from. Here is the list of geolocation services that I contacted:
After I got the geolocation information submitted, I setup internal DNS servers and setup rDNS entries for our routers and CPE. I wrote a separate blog post on how I did that work. I am now in the process of switching my customers CPE over to the new IP addresses. One hiccup that I’ve had so far is SlingTV website not loading and displaying an error message from any of the new IP addresses. I am trying to contact them to get that issue resolved, as I am guessing they have old outdated WAFs or other security systems that are blocking this new IP address assignment.
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