European ISP enables IPv6 for all?

Wed Dec 19 16:28:15 UTC 2007

On 19 dec 2007, at 13:09, Andy Davidson wrote:

> On 19 Dec 2007, at 11:58, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
>> So, out of our /32, if we assign each customer a /48 we can only  
>> support 65k customers. So in order to support millions of  
>> customers, we need a new allocation and I would really like for  
>> each new subnet allocated to be very much larger so we in the  
>> forseeable future don't need to get a newer one. So for larger ISPs  
>> with millions of customers, next step after /32 should be /20 (or  
>> in that neighborhood). Does RIPE/ARIN policy conform to this, so we  
>> don't end up with ISPs themselves having tens of aggregates (we  
>> don't need to drive the default free FIB more than what's really  
>> needed).

RIPE has been giving out _extremely_ large IPv6 blocks on occasion.  
I'm sure that the other RIRs will also give you a bigger block than / 
32 if you expect to need more than that, so please don't limit what  
you give to your customers.

> From the RIPE perspective, there are seven "empty" /32s between my / 
> 32 and the next allocation.

> I imagine this is fully intentional, and allows the NCC to grow my  
> v6 address pool, without growing my footprint in the v6 routing table.

Unfortunately, they do this without there being a community-supported  
policy in place.

IPv4 experience also shows that people rarely merge the adjoining  
space with the existing block when they get the extra space. So all  
this does is fragment the address space and make prefix length filters  
harder. This is really a very bad policy.