I’ve wanted my own Internet address space for a long time. Not “my ISP gave me some statics” space which I’ve had for well over a decade now, but a block that belongs to me, announced into the global routing table by equipment I own, and ideally sitting in the rack in my house. Type the prefix into bgp.tools and see my own ASN sitting there as the origin. How cool! (ok, cool for some, but not most)
That was the whole itch, not particularly rational, but if you’ve ever looked at the Internet’s global routing table and thought “I want to be in there,” you know what I mean.
Why not just buy it from the ISP?
I run mainly Comcast Business at home with a static /28. That has been great for years, and it covers pretty much all of what a home lab actually needs, with most home labs doing Cloudflare Tunnels or VPN, but I wanted real public ingress paths.
What it does not get you is your “own” space. Those addresses are Comcast’s, announced by Comcast, and they go away the day you change providers (or your modem dies… as it has 3 times now?) There’s no BGP session on my side, and there was never going to be one on a DOCSIS business cable drop.
The next tier is a real DIA (Dedicated Internet Access) circuit, terminated in my basement, running BGP with a customer ASN. That absolutely works, but is also big money, plus construction. I still priced it out, laughed, and closed the tab.
So one day I just decided… what would happen if I tried claiming my own block from ARIN? This meant mostly paperwork and some fees (let’s call them hobby expenses yeah?)
Secondary motivation was Comcast now charging near $50/month for a /28… so at $600/year for a much smaller slice I don’t own, I can even save money by going with my own and ditching the /28 (and the provider dependency)
Step 1: Org Handle
Everything at ARIN hangs off an Org ID. Before you can request a single number resource you need an organization, a signed Registration Services Agreement, and Points of Contact attached to it (admin, tech, abuse, at minimum).
This is where a lot of people stall out, because “organization” sounds like you need a building and a payroll, but you don’t. Filing for an LLC in most states is a couple hundred dollars in fees and an afternoon at most.
The one-time Org creation fee with ARIN was $50, but we’re just getting started.
Step 2: The ASN
The requirement for an ASN from ARIN is that you’re going to multihome, or that you otherwise have a unique routing policy that requires your own AS number, so you just name your intended upstreams and your plan. I named two providers I intended to peer with plus a mention of AWS for BYOIP / BYOASN (which had just been announced when I was filing) as part of my ASN justification.
Submitted it, answered one clarifying question from the analyst, and had my own ASN issued in a few days.
The fee then was $255/year and it kinda stung for a while, because an ASN with nothing to announce is $255/year of pure hope. I paid that bill for almost two years before I had a single prefix to put behind it. Worth it, but go in knowing.
Step 3: The /24 v4 and Waitlist
Now here’s the “fun” part.
ARIN has been out of general IPv4 since 2015. What’s left is the waiting list (NRPM 4.1.8), which is fed by blocks that get returned, revoked, or reclaimed. You qualify, you get put in line, and then you wait for the address gods to hand something back.
A few conditions that matter before you get excited:
- The maximum you can qualify for is a /22, and you can elect to accept smaller, down to a /24. I asked for a /24. Smaller ask (and fee), a hopefully shorter queue, and it’s the smallest thing the DFZ will actually carry anyway. A /23 would’ve been better so I could do both AWS and my own advertisements, but that meant risking a much longer wait and harder justification.
- If you already hold more than a /20 equivalent of IPv4 already, you’re not eligible, so I guess you go on the IP auctions and pay dearly for the space?
- Anything you get from the waiting list cannot be transferred for 60 months. Fine by me, I wanted to use it not flip it.
“Justification Required”
ARIN wants demonstrated need on an operating network, not “I’d like to learn BGP pls”. They want to see addresses you are using right now, and a reason those addresses need to become yours.
I had more than I expected:
- The Comcast /28 at home plus two failover providers, fully consumed.
- Services running on AWS, with public addressing that were costing me more since July 2023…
- A handful of VPS instances at different providers, each burning a bunch of public IPs, each one a place I’d rather be running my own space.
Add all of it up and I was already using close to a /25 of other people’s addresses, spread across four or five administrative domains, none of it portable, none of it aggregatable, and all of it renumbered the day I wanted to switch anything. Not to mention failover was a real hassle… those 3 dead Comcast modems? Pain in the ass, every single one.
Got declined initially, then revised it and approved, and got a position in line.
Finally… the wait
Roughly 20 months. Late 2024 to July 2, 2026.
There is no progress bar. You can see the general state of the waiting list on ARIN’s site, but you don’t get a personal ETA and refreshing it does nothing except make you feel things. So you forget about it, you really forget about it (except when you get the $255/year for an ASN that announces nothing)
And then one day there’s an email in your inbox, and it felt like winning the lottery.
Pay the allocation fee ($255, but will be more next year), sign the paperwork, and it’s done.
Cool, now what?
So, on July 2nd I had:
- An autonomous system number
- A /24 of globally unique IPv4 space
- A house with a cable mode, 5G failover, and lots of homelabby stuff in it
… and zero ways to connect the first two things to the third. Comcast is not going to peer with me. I don’t have a DIA circuit. The /24 is a row in a database until somebody, somewhere, with a real BGP session, agrees to accept it from me.
Solving that, and doing it without a five figure circuit, is the whole rest of this series.
Call it $560 to get in the door, then $255/year to stay there. Check ARIN’s current fee schedule before you quote me because it will be different for 2027. Compared to a DIA circuit, or to buying a /24 on the transfer market at 5 figures or more, it’s an absolute bargain, you just pay for it in patience.
Regrets? Would I change anything?
I’m just getting started, but yes, I’d start the clock earlier.
Getting in line from a “let’s see what happens if I do this” got me here, wish I had done it much sooner.
Next up, Part 2: Designing an architecture for resilient multi-homed BGP peering that I can use at home.