IPv6 Default Allocation - What size allocation are you giving out

Thu Oct 9 02:21:00 UTC 2014

Erik,

On Oct 8, 2014, at 6:18 PM, Erik Sundberg <ESundberg at nitelusa.com> wrote:
> I guess the idea of handing a customer /56 (256 /64s) or  a /48 (65,536 /64s) just makes me cringe at the waste.

Don’t cringe. Yeah, a /48 is a crazy amount of space, but that isn’t the resource we are likely to ever need to conserve in the lifetime of IPv6 (well, modulo insane allocation policies the RIR communities could potentially create, but hopefully rational folks will stop that. Hopefully).  If you’re concerned, do the math: e.g., assume a couple of orders of magnitude more allocations per year than the current IPv4 burn rate, assume an IPv6 /48 = an IPv4 /32 and then see how many decades the existing /3 of global unicast IPv6 will last.

The real issue is how we’re going to scale routing. Allocating /48s to all your customers out of your /32 (or /28 or whatever the default ISP allocation is this week) won’t affect that in any significant way.

And besides, allocating all your customers a standard size should make your provisioning systems a lot easier, allowing you to conserve what’s really important...

Regards,
-drc