Addressing plan exercise for our IPv6 course

Thu Jul 29 17:19:36 UTC 2010

On Jul 29, 2010, at 8:00 AM, Matthew Walster wrote:

> On 29 July 2010 15:49, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
>> If we give every household on the planet a /48 (approximately 3 billion
>> /48s), we consume less than 1/8192 of 2000::/3.
> 
> There are 65,536 /48s in a /32. It's not about how available 2000::/3
> is, it's hassle to keep requesting additional PA space. Some ISPs
> literally have millions of customers.
> 
If you have millions of customers, why get a /32? Why not take that fact and
ask for the right amount of space?  1,000,000 customers should easily qualify
you for a /24 or thereabouts. If you have 8,000,000 customers, you should
probably be asking for a /20 or thereabouts.

It's not rocket science to ask for enough address space, and, if you have the
number of customers to justify it based on a /48 per customer, the RIRs will
happily allocate it to you.

> All I'm saying is, why waste the space when they're only going to need
> 1 subnet? If they want more than one subnet, give them a /48,/56,/60
> or whatever, as requested.
> 
For at least the following reasons:

1.	A single subnet may be the norm today because residential users
	and there vendors have been in a scarcity of addresses mentality
	for so long that applications to take full advantage of internet as it
	should be haven't been possible. That will change.

2.	A single subnet may be enough for many (definitely not all and
	possibly not even most) today, but, certainly won't be the norm
	for long once IPv6 is more ubiquitous.

3.	It places unnecessary limitations on the user and makes it unnecessarily
	more difficult to deploy additional capabilities.

4.	Your increasing the workload on your own staff as your customers
	realize that one subnet is no longer enough and come back to you
	for larger assignments.

5.	It's short sighted and assumes that the current IPv4 model will
	permanently apply to IPv6.

Why waste valuable people's time to conserve nearly valueless
renewable resources?

Owen