Addressing plan exercise for our IPv6 course

Thu Jul 29 19:06:18 UTC 2010

On Jul 29, 2010, at 10:41 AM, Stephen Sprunk wrote:

> On 29 Jul 2010 12:19, Owen DeLong wrote:
>> On Jul 29, 2010, at 8:00 AM, Matthew Walster wrote:
>> 
>>> On 29 July 2010 15:49, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> If we give every household on the planet a /48 (approximately 3 billion /48s), we consume less than 1/8192 of 2000::/3.
>>>> 
>>> There are 65,536 /48s in a /32. It's not about how available 2000::/3
>>> is, it's hassle to keep requesting additional PA space. Some ISPs
>>> literally have millions of customers.
>>> 
>> If you have millions of customers, why get a /32? Why not take that fact and ask for the right amount of space?  1,000,000 customers should easily qualify you for a /24 or thereabouts. If you have 8,000,000 customers, you should probably be asking for a /20 or thereabouts.
>> 
> 
> ... and paying sixteen times as much in assignment and maintenance
> fees.  See the problem there?
> 
If you have millions of IPv4 customers, then, you're already paying that
for your IPv4 space. Since you pay the greater of your IPv4 or IPv6
utilization, I think the larger you are, the less likely it is that you
will be paying more for IPv6 than IPv4, even if you give your customers
all /48s of IPv6 instead of /32s of IPv4.

>> It's not rocket science to ask for enough address space, and, if you have the number of customers to justify it based on a /48 per customer, the RIRs will happily allocate it to you.
>> 
> 
> Yes.  However, I don't think the RIRs are as willing to give out address
> space for _potential_ customers, e.g. if a telco or cableco wanted to
> assign a single block to each CO/head end to account for future growth. 
> OTOH, you can get address space based on a /48 per actual customer, then
> actually assign a /64 per potential customer and have enough for massive
> growth.
> 
I believe you can actually do this to a pretty large extent within policy.
The tricky part comes when you need more space and haven't met the
HD Ratio requirements across the board. I agree there's room for improvement
in the policy here.

>> Why waste valuable people's time to conserve nearly valueless
>> renewable resources?
>> 
> 
> By creating artificial scarcity, one can increase profits per unit of
> nearly-valueless, renewable resources.  See also: De Beers and the
> demonizing of artificial diamonds.
> 
There are lots of opportunities to exploit people. I was limiting my comments
to the layer 0-7 issues for the most part. I think optimizing the exploitation
of customers is probably out of charter for this list.

Owen