Re: Definitive Guide to IPv6 adoption

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

On Oct 18, 2010, at 7:24 PM, Doug Barton wrote:

> On 10/18/2010 5:16 PM, Robert E. Seastrom wrote:
> > sthaug () nethelp no writes:
> >
> > > I still haven't seen any good argument for why residential users need
> > > /48s. No, I don't think "that makes all the address assignments the
> > > same size" is a particularly relevant or convincing argument.
> > >
> > > We're doing /56 for residential users, and have no plans to change
> > > this.
> >
> > If we were to give a /48 to every human on the face of the planet, we
> > would use about .000025 of the total available IPv6 address space.
>
> I'm confused. The "hand out /48s everywhere" crowd keeps saying that we need to do that because we haven't yet 
> anticipated everything that end users might want to do with a /48 on their CPE. On the wider issue of "we don't yet 
> understand everything that can be done with the space" I think we're in agreement. However my conclusion is that 
> "therefore we should be careful to preserve the maximum flexibility possible."
Right... Giving /48s to end users for native IPv6 deployments still preserves 99.9975% (or more) of the IPv6 space
while not stifling innovation on the CPE side. Maximum flexibility is preserved on both sides of the ISP/customer
boundary.

Giving customers less doesn't really increase meaningful flexibility for the providers, it just keeps more address space
on the shelf gathering dust.

> After we have some operational experience with IPv6 we will be in a position to make better decisions; but we have to 
> GET operational experience first. Grousing about lack of adherence to holy writ in that deployment doesn't help 
> anybody.
Some of us actually have some operational experience with IPv6.

As such, I'm not grousing about holy writ, I'm talking about real consequences of real actions in real world 
implementations.

Owen