[114146] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Where to buy Internet IP addresses
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mikael Abrahamsson)
Sat May 2 01:42:30 2009
Date: Sat, 2 May 2009 07:42:21 +0200 (CEST)
From: Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike@swm.pp.se>
To: Matthew Palmer <mpalmer@hezmatt.org>
In-Reply-To: <20090502002406.GK4507@hezmatt.org>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On Sat, 2 May 2009, Matthew Palmer wrote:
> Handing out an IPv6 /56 to a DSL or cable customer should be handled much
> the same way as giving them an IPv4 /29 is today -- ask, and it shall be
> provided, but it's wasteful[1] to do so by default.
>
> [1] Just because we've got a lot of it, doesn't mean we should be pissing it
> up against the wall unnecessarily. A motto for network engineers and
> economists alike.
You can't be wasteful with something that you know is already extremely
plentyful.
We currently have 72 million billion /56:es. If we do /56:es of the
current /16 being handed out and then change our mind, we can still hand
out 1100 billion /56:es before we can discover this was wasteful and
then we will have spent one 65536th of the address space available.
Give people a /56 and if they only use one NOW, you still won't have to
handle administration of the customer when they change their mind. Current
NAT boxes solve the problem of people only getting a single IP address.
People adapt to the conditions we give them. When IPv6 is readily
available there will be products that use several subnets in the home, if
we start to just give them a single /64 there won't be a market to solve
it this way, and people will continue to use a single /64. You can say you
were right, there was no need, but you killed the multisubnet solution
before it was even born.
--
Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
