[address-policy-wg] getting second IPv6 PA as a LIR

Remco,

On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 6:18 PM, Remco Van Mook
<Remco.vanMook at eu.equinix.com> wrote:
> Marcin Kuczera wrote:
>> Seriously, is there ANY resonable reason why policy for IPv6 PI can not be
>> same as for IPv4 PI ?
>
> Because the IPv4 PI policy is an unfortunate relic that has seen much uhm, creative use that required a policy such as 2007-01 to clean up and has so far taken dozens of man years to implement?

Isn't 2007-01 in place for IPv6 PI today already?

> If you don't want to or can't pay for resources you use, you should be asking yourself questions.
>
> If you're not running a sustainable business, you're exercising a hobby. Why would somebody else pay for your hobby?

The business *is* sustainable, with IPv4! They're even paying for it
according to the policies of the community.

How is it even possible that a IPv6 resource, which are practically
infinite, can bear a cost which is ~50x higher for the same use, than
the cost of a IPv4 resource, which is about to run out?  If anything,
these are *not* values derived from a market.

The cost with prefixes that I think you refer to, comes not from the
act of registering them in a registry, but from the use of them with a
routing protocol, like BGP.
If the cost in the core of BGP cannot scale with the size of the
internetwork, I'd say this is primarily a problem with the routing
protocol and not the mere fact that some chunks of space has names
next to them in a database, chunks of space which may or may not
participate in this voluntary routing activity.

> As far as I've seen, the cost of utility power and network hardware in what you describe as 'post communistic block' is not that different from what you describe as 'old Europe', so I'm intrigued how those (I think far more significant) costs affect you.

Power/network hardware scales closer to number of customers than the
LIR cost, which is a *much* more stepwise cost at small sizes, do.
Maybe we can get one such example ISP with 300-700 customers to show
its books to prove this point.

Now, assuming that point can be proven: that 50 EUR/year is a bearable
cost for IPv4 resources, but ~2000+ EUR for IPv6 is not(*), the
question becomes:
Would the RIPE community like to adjust this unbalance between IPv4
and IPv6 somehow?

Any decision/agreement, or lack thereof, has consequences.

Regards,
Martin

* It's also not very hard to imagine that the highly competitive
market (good thing, no?) may make it very hard for one ISP to increase
its prices, just to offer IPv6 to its customers via means of being a
LIR, when another may find a much cheaper way to obtain an IPv6 prefix
(from some sponsoring LIR/co-op LIR in some fashion, say, for
example).  If that scales up, two things will occur: 1) RIPE's
policies will be overrun, 2) filtering praxis's will be eroded.  I
think it's quite optimistic to believe any *registration* policies are
going to hold off this particular piece of reality.