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

michael.dillon at bt.com wrote:
>> Just to drop a bit of bait into this lively discussion :-9 - 
>> we could actually afford to give every organization that 
>> reasonably claims to serve IP connectivity to more than 1000 
>> customers a /24.  There's 10 million /24s inside FP 001.  All 
>> in all, the RIRs have about 20.000 members today - 1/500th of that.
>>     
>
> Now those are numbers that I can understand. I think everyone knows
> what a /24 is, because even in IPv6 it is the same percentage of the
> total number space as it is in IPv4. 
>
> Either we accept the fact that 6RD relies on assigning
> address blocks sparsely within the allocation for technical
> reasons, and just give 6RD ISP's an allocation big enough
> to do the job, or we write a special policy for 6RD ISPs.
>
> There are only 2 reasons that I can see to write a special policy.
> One is to encourage ISPs to assign /56 prefixes to customers,
> not longer ones like /60. 
Or /60s vs. /64s. I think you may be a little optimistic if you think 
that /60 is the low end of the totem pole here.

Case in point is that when Free first offered its IPv6 service, it did 
so within the /32 it had by giving /64s to all its customers. A few 
folks like myself complained, and they changed it only because they were 
able to get a large enough allocation from RIPE (which they had to go 
back and ask for). If that had not happened, it's not like Free would 
have ripped out its entire DSLAM infrastructure and upgraded it to offer 
a /60 or /56. The choice would have been /64 or nothing. Period.

So, here's a case where RIPE's decision, for whatever reason at the 
time, of asking Free to hand in its /32 (and, yes, Free gave it back 
AFAIK) and giving them a /26 instead directly affected the IPv6 service 
to myself and several hundred thousand IPv6 Internet subscribers in 
France. RIPE NCC, thank you kindly for that! (and for the socials!)
> And the other is to restrict 6RD
> allocations only to ISPs that maintain a certain amount of
> density, i.e. if an ISP has lots of IPv4 allocations scattered 
> all around the IPv4 number space, we might say that they cannot
> have an IPv6 allocation to cover more than x number of IPv4 /8s.
>
> But given that there is no shortage of IPv6 addresses in the
> foreseeable future, I'm not yet convinced that a new policy is
> needed.
>   
I'd be perfectly fine with no new policy, as long as ISPs, even 
relatively small ones, do not delay IPv6 deployment over lack of 
obtainable space. Right now, I'm seeing timelines for Ipv6 pushed up 
rather than pushed back, in a number of cases due to 6rd. As long as we 
are not reversing that trend, I'll calmly go back to not posting here :-)

- Mark
> --Michael Dillon
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