[address-policy-wg] 2015-03 New Policy Proposal (Assessment Criteria for IPv6 Initial Allocation Size)

Dear WG,

As one of the authors behind 2015-03 please accept my apologies for not being able to attend today's AP WG session, and a particularly apology (and thanks!) to Alexander for letting him have to take the virtual stage and face the questions by himself!

I would like to respond to a query raised by a gentleman in the audience (apologies I couldn't catch the name) regarding, if I understood correctly, a concern that the large allocations that the policy proposal is intended to provide for may lead to growth in the Internet routing table. Whilst I cannot speak for anyone's IPv6 addressing strategy but the UK MOD's I can confirm that concern over routing table growth was one of the key drivers behind the requirement for what ends up being a large allocation as the hierarchy and aggregation that this affords us mean we can summarise external routes far more easily than would otherwise be possible.

Whilst the policy proposal is not intended to cater solely for the UK MOD, and therefore I want to try and stay clear of discussing issues specific to the UK MOD if at all possible (happy to try and do so when requested/required though), I can understand if there are specific concerns about an allocation being made to what is such a large and complex organisation like ours - and a relatively unique one at that. However, I should highlight that given the security constraints and connectivity requirements of the environment we operate in the vast majority of external routing announcements will only be visible to coalition partners (other nations' military networks, NATO infrastructure, etc) and will not appear in the routing tables of what you might call the 'publicly visible' portion of the Internet. The general point still stands though - aggregation and summarisation is (and should be) key regardless of how much equivalent address space is being allocated.

Perhaps I have misunderstood the comment/concern? Happy to continue the discussion either way though.

Regards,

Mathew

P.S. I am not au fait with the etiquette of this mailing list - should specific sub-discussions of a given proposal be split off with their own subject line?