/48 for each and every endsite (Was: European ISP enables IPv6 for all?)

Wed Dec 19 22:40:54 UTC 2007

On Wed, 19 Dec 2007, Owen DeLong wrote:

> Do you mean the staff at the RIR?
>
> Do you mean the RIR Boards, Advisory Councils, or other representative 
> governing bodies?

Both these. The few times I have ventured to start emailing on a policy wg 
emailing list, I have gotten the notion that people who habit these have 
no idea about operational reality of running an ISP. They also expect 
suggestions in a form that is quite academic and one that most likely 
nobody actually working operationally at an ISP will be able to produce (I 
found the email reply to me from Jeroen Massar to be right on the money 
what I expect in this context).

Yes, I understand that if your life is to run an RIR, it's frustrating to 
have to interact with people that don't even use the correct terms and 
separate between allocations, delegations and assignments.

> IPv6 needs a much longer time horizon than IPv4 in my opinion.  If 
> nothing else, I would say that you should be able to project your 
> addressing needs for the next two years at least in the ball-park of 
> continuing your previous growth trends.  If you added 100k customers 
> last year and 80k customers the year before, then, I think it's 
> reasonable, especially in IPv6, to plan for 125k customer adds next year 
> and 150k customer adds the following year.

Yes, so why does the RIRs still ask for a 2 year planning horizon for 
IPv6? Why isn't this 5 or 10 years? If we have plenty of addresses and 
hand out a /28 for each AS number present on the internet right now, that 
would be equivalent to each AS supporting 270M /56 customers but we would 
still only have used up /15 of the IPv6 address space. We would though 
have fairly well have made sure that more than 99% of ISPs will only ever 
need a single IPv6 PA block, hopefully making DFZ glut less in 10-15 
years.

> If you're figures turn out to be excessive, then, in two years when 
> you'd normally have to apply for more space (I'd like to see this move 
> to more like 5 for IPv6), you can skip that application until you catch 
> up.  No real problem for anyone in that case.

I don't want anyone to apply for more space later as this would normally 
mean a second route. If everybody needs to do this, then we'll add 40k 
routes to DFZ without any good reason.

> So split the difference and ask for a /28.  Personally, I think /56s are 
> plenty for most residential users.  I'm a pretty serious residential 
> end-user, and, I can't imagine I'd need more than a /56 in terms of 
> address planning.  However, I have a /48 because that's the smallest 
> direct assignment available for my multihomed end-site.

I agree, but with current policy, asking for a /28 means (afaik) that I 
have to claim to have 270M /56 customers in 2-5 years. That's a pretty 
bold statement. But I guess that we can just keep only telling lies to the 
RIRs to get our addresses, which has been the standard workaround.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se