[ipv6-wg at ripe.net] Policy for allocation of IPv6 address space from IANA to RIRs

On 9-aug-04, at 17:38, leo vegoda wrote:

> The Number Resource Organisation (NRO) has published a proposal for a 
> policy for the allocation of IPv6 address space from the IANA to the 
> RIRs. It is intended that this proposed policy should be agreed by all 
> RIRs' open policy fora and then approved by the ASO and ICANN as a 
> global policy.

Reserving a /6 for each RIR seems like the other extreme to me. In IPv4 
we have around 220 /8s that have been given out to RIRs pretty much one 
at a time in the past. In IPv6 we effectively have 8 /6s. This means 
that as a percentage of total available space, the RIRs get more than 
25 times more IPv6 space than they've been given IPv4 space in the 
past, even though a v4 /8 will accommodate at most 16.8M end-user 
assignments (less in practice) while a v6 /6 allows for AT LEAST 4.4T 
(yes, that's 10^12) end-user assignments.

Now I can see SOME value in trying to have relatively large RIR blocks, 
but cutting up all non-reserved space so aggressively really doesn't 
have any upsides, and we never know whether we're going to need any 
really large blocks in the future. Also, doubling every time is ok for 
a while, but it pretty much guarantees that you're going to have way 
too much space on your hands at some point.

A more reasonable policy would be:

- reserve a /12 for each RIR now (a 4 bit boundary makes DNS 
delegations easier, I think a /8 is too much but that might work also)
- then, for every delegation, give RIRs enough space to each to last a 
year comfortably
- evaluate whether a new delegation is needed every 3 or 4 months, 
making the time of new delegations easy to predict