Definitive Guide to IPv6 adoption

Dan White dwhite at olp.net
Tue Oct 19 13:24:30 UTC 2010


On 18/10/10 19:24 -0700, Doug Barton wrote:
>On 10/18/2010 5:16 PM, Robert E. Seastrom wrote:
>>
>>sthaug at nethelp.no writes:
>>
>>>I still haven't seen any good argument for why residential users need
>>>/48s. No, I don't think "that makes all the address assignments the
>>>same size" is a particularly relevant or convincing argument.
>>>
>>>We're doing /56 for residential users, and have no plans to change
>>>this.
>>
>>If we were to give a /48 to every human on the face of the planet, we
>>would use about .000025 of the total available IPv6 address space.
>
>I'm confused. The "hand out /48s everywhere" crowd keeps saying that 
>we need to do that because we haven't yet anticipated everything that 
>end users might want to do with a /48 on their CPE. On the wider 
>issue of "we don't yet understand everything that can be done with 
>the space" I think we're in agreement. However my conclusion is that 
>"therefore we should be careful to preserve the maximum flexibility 
>possible."
>
>After we have some operational experience with IPv6 we will be in a 
>position to make better decisions; but we have to GET operational 
>experience first. Grousing about lack of adherence to holy writ in 
>that deployment doesn't help anybody.

I agree with you, but have come to a different conclusion. I would fall
under the /48s crowd, except that I'm not really interested in an attempt
to standardize /48 deployments. But I still feel strongly that a /48
assignment model for residential customers is right for our environment.

With v4 assignments, we have a different philosophy. When we received our
v4 assignments from ARIN, is was natural for us to take a conservative
approach when handing out addresses... by default we assign one dynamic
address to each customer and provide one or more static addresses for a
nominal fee to customers, not because we want to make money from it, but
because we want to be good stewards of those addresses. That's our 'fail
safe' approach to v4 distribution (1 per customer).

With v6, our 'fail safe' approach, without strong operational experience,
is to assign larger blocks rather than smaller. A cycle in our staff in 5
or 10 years is likely to appreciate that decision, and we can't really
justify a /56-rather-than-/48 decision based on address constraints. We
really do have the addresses to support /48 deployments for the foreseeable
future, and would expect future staff to request more addresses when
they're needed.

-- 
Dan White




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