New IANA allocations to RIPE NCC

william(at)elan.net william at elan.net
Sat May 8 01:30:41 UTC 2004



On Sat, 8 May 2004, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

> On 8-mei-04, at 1:18, william(at)elan.net wrote:
> 
> > Why so many ip6 blocks at once?
> 
> The RIPE NCC gives out /32s to ISPs, but they actually reserve a /29. 
> This means they have to get a new /23 for every 64 ISPs that request v6 
> space. I imagine this gets old fast after a while.  :-)

I imagine so, but the question is are they growing so fast with new ip6 
allocations. As I understand there are about 3500 LIRs/members at RIPE.
Given that each /23 is enough for 64 members and they have just received
16 of these, that would make it enough space for 1024 ISPs/LIRs/members.
Since IANA assigns ip blocks based on RIR need for next year that makes it 
appear that RIPE is expecting that 1/3 of its LIRs would request and start
using IP6 within next year. I personally question these expectations given 
current still slow growth of ip6.

> What I don't get is that they made it 16 /23s rather than one /19. (And 
> staying on 4 bit boundaries would also seem like a slightly more 
> obvious choice.)

IANA seems to continue same practice with IPv6 as it does with IPv4.
If you remember just this month RIPE got 85/8, 86/8, 87/8, 88/8 from IANA.
Since these are 4 /8s were we expecting to see this as /6 and be on correct
boundary? Well - not really as its now how IANA is doing allocations. 
Unlike RIRs that actually do give out /16, /19, /20, /21, etc, IANA does it 
always in quantities of its smallest RIR allocation unit, which is /8
for IPv4 and /23 for IPv6, it does seem that they try to keep allocations
to same RIR in consequence allowing in the future to consider it to be one
larger ip space block (/4 if RIPE gets all space from 80/8 to 95/8 and 
that appears to be quite likely possibility for the future).

> > but is ripe really using ip6 20 times more then rest of the world?
> 
> Not 20 times obviously... But the ARIN region does very little v6, 
> while in Europe there are many more small ISPs than in Asia, which 
> leads to a larger number of assignments/allocations.

My understanding is that they have made twice as many ip6 allocations as 
rest of the world combined! That is very impressive indeed!!!
But its still not enough reason for them to have received more then 10 
times ip6 space from IANA as rest of the RIRs combined...

-- 
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william at elan.net




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