Where to buy Internet IP addresses

Mon May 4 14:27:41 UTC 2009

> Joe Greco wrote:
> > One of the goals of providing larger address spaces was to reduce (and
> > hopefully eliminate) the need to burn forwarding table entries where
> > doing so isn't strictly necessary.  When we forget this, it leads us
> > to the same sorts of disasters that we currently have in v4.
> 
> And if you are encouraging /48 handouts, /32 isnt large enough to 
> prevent that on the global level.

I don't know that I'm *en*couraging /48 handouts, but on the other hand,
I'm not sure I'm *dis*couraging it either.

On one hand, there's a reasonable argument to be made that the average
home user does not currently have enough devices to fill more than a
/124's worth of space.

But.

You have RFC3041 and similar techniques, stateless autoconfig, and a
variety of other general things that make it really awful for the default
ethernet network size to be something besides a /64.

Further, it seems clear from most discussions I've had, that people
really do want or need the ability to have multiple networks, for a
variety of practical reasons.  Many of these have to do with keeping
different zones firewalled in particular ways, 

So, really, I think the question is, how many unique firewalling
policies is a household likely to have, and then, maybe how many other
neighbors/friends/etc are also freeloading on that connection, each
with the same needs?

A /56 allows up to 256 networks.  For today, that's pretty clearly
all that I can reasonably imagine even a sophisticated home network
along with several neighbors needing.  Probably even within the next
ten years.  At some point, however, it is possible that a /48 would
be a better choice.

I would definitely prefer to see a /56, or maybe a /48, handed out
today.

If we get into the practice of handing out /64's, it is just going
to encourage bad hacky design compromises and CPE/SOHO gear kludges
in the future?

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.