Re: Addressing plan exercise for our IPv6 course

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

On Jul 29, 2010, at 10:41 AM, Stephen Sprunk wrote:

> On 29 Jul 2010 12:19, Owen DeLong wrote:
> > On Jul 29, 2010, at 8:00 AM, Matthew Walster wrote:
> >
> > > On 29 July 2010 15:49, Owen DeLong <owen () delong com> wrote:
> > >
> > > > If we give every household on the planet a /48 (approximately 3 billion /48s), we consume less than 1/8192 of 
> > > > 2000::/3.
> > > There are 65,536 /48s in a /32. It's not about how available 2000::/3
> > > is, it's hassle to keep requesting additional PA space. Some ISPs
> > > literally have millions of customers.
> > If you have millions of customers, why get a /32? Why not take that fact and ask for the right amount of space?  
> > 1,000,000 customers should easily qualify you for a /24 or thereabouts. If you have 8,000,000 customers, you should 
> > probably be asking for a /20 or thereabouts.
>
> ... and paying sixteen times as much in assignment and maintenance
> fees.  See the problem there?
If you have millions of IPv4 customers, then, you're already paying that
for your IPv4 space. Since you pay the greater of your IPv4 or IPv6
utilization, I think the larger you are, the less likely it is that you
will be paying more for IPv6 than IPv4, even if you give your customers
all /48s of IPv6 instead of /32s of IPv4.

> > It's not rocket science to ask for enough address space, and, if you have the number of customers to justify it 
> > based on a /48 per customer, the RIRs will happily allocate it to you.
>
> Yes.  However, I don't think the RIRs are as willing to give out address
> space for _potential_ customers, e.g. if a telco or cableco wanted to
> assign a single block to each CO/head end to account for future growth. 
> OTOH, you can get address space based on a /48 per actual customer, then
> actually assign a /64 per potential customer and have enough for massive
> growth.
I believe you can actually do this to a pretty large extent within policy.
The tricky part comes when you need more space and haven't met the
HD Ratio requirements across the board. I agree there's room for improvement
in the policy here.

> > Why waste valuable people's time to conserve nearly valueless
> > renewable resources?
>
> By creating artificial scarcity, one can increase profits per unit of
> nearly-valueless, renewable resources.  See also: De Beers and the
> demonizing of artificial diamonds.
There are lots of opportunities to exploit people. I was limiting my comments
to the layer 0-7 issues for the most part. I think optimizing the exploitation
of customers is probably out of charter for this list.

Owen