[address-policy-wg] IPv6 allocations for 6RD

> It's not going to be temporary and it's not going to be 'a 
> few' - also I shudder to think what the 1500-ish LIRs who 
> already have a /32 allocation will do based on this.

6RD costs money. There will not be very many ISPs doing
6RD and the 1500 LIRs are not going to derail their
existing deployment efforts. It costs money to implement
6RD, it costs money to operate 6RD and it costs money to
remove/replace 6RD with native IPv6. The organizations that
will use 6RD are the ones who get a financial benefit from
delaying spending on native IPv6. Perhaps they have older 
routers in their network that are not yet end-of-life. Or
perhaps their systems support tools are coded in unreadable
PERL code by people who left the company 10 years ago.

6RD is not a magic bullet, just one more option to consider
for migrating the complex path between today's IPv4 Internet
and the native IPv6 Internet of 2015. 

And as others have pointed out, we can afford to give every 
RIPE LIR a /24 if we have to. There is no reason to panic
and this is not a slippery slope situation since real-world
considerations limit the number of LIRs who would use 6RD.

> Probably 
> get the extra /24 and not return the /32 because there's 
> already some stuff in there that can't be migrated because 
> it's too expensive and will hurt IPv6 deployment. The same 
> arguments supporting 6RD right now.

This is not a question of arguments. The 1500 LIRs who already
have IPv6 allocations are already running IPv6 services. Many
of them have customers using their IPv6 services already. 
It is possible that some of them might decide to use 6RD for
their broadband because of complex issues with the broadband
access network, but given that leased line and data centre
services are generally more profitable, or tied to more profitable
customer contracts, I don't see why anyone would want to migrate
away from an existing /32 allocation.

> The good news is, this will double the IPv6 routing table in 
> size. The bad news is, this will double the IPv6 routing 
> table in size.

Not very relevant. The IPv6 routing table is not that big right
now, the addressing architecture tends to limit growth of
this table and vendors have already demonstrated the ability
to handle much bigger routing tables than today.

--Michael Dillon