Ha: [address-policy-wg] RE: an arithmetic lesson

Hi,

On Thu, Dec 03, 2009 at 11:21:04PM +0100, Remco van Mook wrote:
> here's a hard one - if all new allocations in IPv6 are now going to be
> /24s, don't you think that will affect the charging scheme since it
> vastly increases the average amount of address space allocated,
> therefore lowering the amount that would be charged for such a resource?

This is actually mixing two different arguments from my end.

One argument was "if every LIR gets a /24, we still have just scratched
the amount of /24s available, so the world would not stop turning".

What you are replying-to was in the context of "if we give LIRs the 
option(!) to ask for a bigger allocation for 6RDs, this is bad, because
all of a sudden every single LIR is going to claim 'we want 6rd!'"
(without mentioning a specific "large block!!" size for 6rd deployment) 
- and in this scenario, blocks of different size would continue to 
exist, and quite likely have different price tags attached to it
(and very likely, different amount of discussion with the IPRAs).


So - your assumption "if we give all of them an IPv6 /24, this will be the
common size, and the score is very likely going to be lower than for an
IPv6 /24 today" is reasonable, but doesn't contradict what I wrote, because
that was in the context of "there's different block sizes".


> All of a sudden that large block is just an average size; while I don't
> claim to understand all the intricacies of the charging scheme I will
> claim that handing out a larger block isn't necessarily more work than
> handing out a smaller one, and the way the charging scheme works is not
> to maximize income, but to match the sum of expenses the NCC makes in
> order to provide their services.

Yes.

> Not that I'm looking for an argument to increase the 'standard'
> allocation size, but the charging scheme isn't a good argument against,
> I think.

No, there was confusion between two different lines of argument.

Note that I did not propose a certain way forward.  I was trying to point
out why certain "we can't do that, because <the world will end>" statments
usually don't properly take the numbers involved into account, or are based 
on "everbody will..." arguments that are just not so.  

(The old argument "and everybody thought 640k was enough!" also gets boring 
after a few repetitions (and has never been helpful in any way, except as
a poor excuse of not looking at the bits and doing some math).)


> Remco
> (There were also 2 million Class C blocks, that doesn't make it a good
> idea to hand out IPv6 in a similar way. Party like it's 1993 stopped in
> well, 1994.)

I'm not sure why that is an argument for or against anything - we still
give out IPv4 in chunks of /24 or bigger.  And anybody who goes to the 
RIPE NCC and asks for IPv4 PI and claims "I have more than 128 machines 
to number!" *will* get an IPv4 /24.

IPv6 /24s would be for LIRs, potentially only for LIRs that fulfill
some creative criteria why they need more than <arbitrary number> chunks 
of addresses.  As I said: our LIR wouldn't need a /24.  So the number 
of potential IPv6 /24 holders would be vastly lower than for IPv4.

Gert Doering
        -- no specific hat
-- 
Total number of prefixes smaller than registry allocations:  144438

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