how 200 /48's fails the job [Re: [address-policy-wg] Policy proposal: #gamma IPv6 Initial Allocation Criteria]

On 6-apr-05, at 1:37, Jørgen Hovland wrote:

> There is no such thing as technical limitations/reasons, only 
> economical.

Nobody can transport an IP packet faster than 300000 km/s (well, more 
like 200000 km/s in practice) no matter how much money they have.

> I don't see an economical reason for why normal network providers 
> shouldn't be able to handle 500,000 IPv6 routes.

It's too expensive. Don't forget that a typical router takes a bunch of 
full feeds (or equivalent in partial feeds) from different peers, so 
0.5M routes probably means your router needs to support 2 - 5 M BGP 
routes. And of course you need a FIB that's large enough and can be 
searched fast enough.

> Existing operators may need to upgrade something or they have to 
> downgrade to singlehoming if they do not wish to upgrade.

It's not just the multihomers that need a router that supports a full 
BGP table. Medium-sized and larger ISPs need to have routers that hold 
full tables too, they don't have a choice.

> With that in mind, isn't this what you are looking for: A natural way 
> to limit the amount of multihomed autonomous systems/amount of 
> prefixes without enforcing unreasonable policies?

That's why I proposed "provider-internal aggregation based on 
geography" but this fell on deaf ears. Go for the quick fix PI block 
and let someone else clean up the mess seems to be the prevailing 
attitude.

> IPv6 won't survive if you keep having silly policies (and I still 
> think that includes the fixed size /48 customer assignment policy).

What's silly about that?

A fixed prefix length is very useful because that way you only have to 
renumber the top 48 bits when you switch ISPs. This makes life much 
easier.