IPv6 internet broken, Verizon route prefix length policy

Tue Oct 13 01:48:49 UTC 2009

David Conrad wrote:
> On Oct 12, 2009, at 3:40 PM, Mark Andrews wrote:
>>> Verizon's policy has been related to me that they will not accept
>>> or propogate any IPv6 route advertisements with prefix lengths
>>> longer than /32.  Full stop.  So that even includes those of us
>>> that have /48 PI space from ARIN that are direct customers of
>>> Verizon.

>> Looks like Verizon doesn't want any IPv6 customers.  If a company 
>> has idiotic policies like this vote with your wallet.

> Not knowing all the details, it is difficult for me to judge, however
> it is worth observing that provider independent addresses, regardless
> of where they come from or whether they are IPv4 or IPv6 simply do
> not scale.  In the face of everybody and their mother now being able
> to obtain PI prefixes from all the RIRs, any ISP that handles full
> routing is going to have to hope their router vendor of choice can
> keep buying more/bigger CAMs (passing the expense on to the ISP who
> will pass it on to their customers) and/or they'll start implementing
> the same sort of prefix length limitations that we saw back in the
> mid-90s.

> And, of course, we have IPv4 runout in the near future with the
> inevitable market which will almost certainly promote the use of
> longer prefixes.

And I look at the other side of it.  For us "mere" end-user organization 
(ie, not big backbone ISPs who have dominated the discussion for so 
long), IPv6 without PI is an utter and complete non-starter.

Despite how huge of a proponent of IPv6 deployment that I am, until PI 
space was available, I didn't start the work, because without PI space, 
its utter foolishness for a company that depends on their Internet 
access to move forward.  I don't think its a coincidence that we've seen 
a big uptick in deployment of IPv6 since PI space became available. 
Telling end-user organizations to get a block from each upstream and 
multihome by putting an address from each upstream on every system is 
now and always has been a bad joke.

> In other words, get used to it.

In other words, figure it out.  Either we'll have PI space in IPv6, or 
IPv4 is going to get *crazy* fragmented as continually smaller blocks 
are bought and sold.

If you want to keep your cam tables from blowing up, I truly think the 
way forward is to get people to IPv6 as quickly as possible, where they 
can get blocks big enough to put all of their address space in 1 or 2 
blocks, rather than the 4, 7 or more, blocks that they're currently 
using for IPv4.

And, no, not everyone deaggregates for TE purposes.  No network that 
I've ever been in charge of has ever advertised anything but the most 
aggregated blocks that we could given the allocations/assignments we 
had.  We'll have savings from that, and if you want to filter to limit 
deaggregating for TE purposes, I'm quite OK with that.

But if you cut out PI space, you're dead in the water, we just can't 
have that.

-- 
Jeff McAdams