IPv6 - real vs theoretical problems

Tue Jan 11 18:45:41 UTC 2011

On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 3:44 PM, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
<snip>
> There are multiple purposes to /48s to residential end users.
>
> DHCP-PD allows a lot of future innovations not yet available.
>
>        Imagine a house where the border router receives a /48
>        from the ISP and delegates /64s or /60s or whatever to
>        other routers within the house.
>
>        Each home entertainment cluster may be one group of
>        networks with its own router.
>
>        The appliance network(s) may have their own router(s).
>
>        RFID tags on groceries may lead to a time when your
>        home automation server can gather up data from your
>        refrigerator, pantries, etc. and present the inventory
>        on your mobile phone while you're at the grocery store.
>        No more need to maintain a shopping list, just query
>        the inventory from the store.
>
> These are just the things that could easily be done with the
> technology we already know about. Imagine what we might
> think of once we get more used to having prefix abundance.
<snip>

Having more address space won't help most of these uses, and as for
why, take a look at the proposed situation with for example home media
serving/sharing systems by TiVo, Apple, etc. They all require that the
units be within the same broadcast domain or that there be a
configured bridge of some sort if they even allow that topology.  They
(actually rightfully) assume that the network topology is flat, single
broadcast domain, and mroe and more use Multicast DNS (which I've seen
called a bunch of different things)  More to the point, your average
home user can not technically fathom anything more complicated than
"plug it in" -- and many begin to fail to set something up properly
when its extended to something as complicated as "plug it in, push a
button" or "plug it in, type some numbers into the device"

Your average home user has no reason at all for anything more than a
PtP to his/her gateway, and a single prefix routed to that gateway.
There are most certainly a few (which includes I'm sure 99% of the
NANOGers!) subscribers who can and will use more space than that, and
ISPs most definitely should make /48s readily and easily available for
those customers, but giving each and every customer a /48 (or really,
even a pair of /64s, one for the PtP, one delegated) is almost
certainly overkill.  The devices won't use the extra space unless
there's some automagic way of them communicating the desire to
eachother, and appropriately configuring themselves, and it would have
to be very widely accepted.  But there's no technical gain.  A typical
household would probably have less than about 50, maybe 100 devices,
even if we start networking appliances like toasters, hair dryers and
every single radio, tv, and light switch.

Just my 2 cents worth.