/56 for home sites, /48 for business sites & billing considerations (Was: European ISP enables IPv6 for all?)

Leo Vegoda leo.vegoda at icann.org
Thu Jan 3 10:01:13 UTC 2008


On 23 Dec 2007, at 20:34, Jeroen Massar wrote:

[...]

>>> When an ISP is not going to provide /48's to endusers then RIPE NCC
>>> should revoke the IPv6 prefix they received as they are not  
>>> following
>>> the reasons why they received the prefix for.
>>
>> They received the prefix because they had a plan. That's all, a plan.
>> Not a promise.
>
> It is not a plan, it is justification. The 200-rule has been taken out
> of the allocation already.

Right. But circumstances change.

> And based on the x customers times /48, they justified that they will
> need a /20 or something else. As such when they are going to give out
> /56's, they suddenly need 256 times as many customers and unless they
> are going to grow insanely (for a /32 from ~60k to 15m customers) they
> won't be able to justify their address space anymore.

One issue ISPs with very large IPv6 allocations may be thinking about  
is that additional allocations are always based on the policies in  
place when they make their request, not the policies in place when  
they received their initial allocation. If the policy has become more  
conservative since the allocation was made there is a chance that the  
plan that justified the initial allocation will need to be modified to  
take account of the changed policy.

In other words, an allocation that was made based on an ISPs needs for  
just the next few years might have to last considerably longer. The  
alternative could be the ISP finding its efficiency is too low to  
justify the extra block it has requested.

So I won't be too surprised if I see some ISPs assigning some /56s  
when their original plans were only for /48 assignments.

Regards,

Leo



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