[117992] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: ISP customer assignments
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael Dillon)
Thu Oct 8 11:30:16 2009
In-Reply-To: <4ACDF61E.9030900@xyonet.com>
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 2009 16:29:39 +0100
From: Michael Dillon <wavetossed@googlemail.com>
To: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
> Sorry to be a curmudgeon and let me play devil's advocate for a minute.=
=A0 I
> realize that the address space is enormous; gigantic, even, but if we tre=
at
> it as cavalierly as you all are proposing, it will get used up.=A0 If its
> treated like an infinite resource=A0 that will never, ever be used up as =
we
> have done with every other resource on the planet, won't we find ourselve=
s
> in a heap of trouble?
Of course, you are right.
That's why, when some people took a close look at the numbers based on
a /48 per site, and published their findings, the RIRs made an adjustment t=
o
address allocation policy so that it was acceptable to allocate a /56 for a
consumer customer, i.e. private residence of some sort. By doing that, they
calculated that they could mitigate the small risk that we would run very l=
ow
on IPv6 addresses around 100 years from now. Having made the change, we
are now confident that there are plenty of IPv6 addresses to last more than
a century, which basically means that you and your children and your grand
children will all be dead when IPv6 gets close to exhaustion.
Geoff Huston wrote this: <http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2005-07/ipv6size.ht=
ml>
to explain the small risk, and his proposals to adjust the HD ratio and go =
to
a /56 for private residential assignments was basically accepted. If only a=
few
of the biggest cable ISPs use the /56 model, then we are OK.
I have great confidence that our descendants will avoid the Idiocracy and
be capable of designing and deploying a replacement for IPv6 if that is eve=
r
needed. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy> Last time I checked, my
taps were still delivering fresh clean "toilet water", not Brawndo energy d=
rink.
--Michael Dillon
