[arin-discuss] Trying to Understand IPV6

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> Quite frankly what I don't get is why anyone thinks that consumers want
> public numbers inside their home/LANs.  Once my customers understood
> the benefit of hiding behind a NAT, they embraced it quite
> emphatically.

Why do people want public phone numbers on their phones?

So people can call them. Same reason applies for public addressing
in their home networks only the devices receiving calls will be many
and varied and unlike mere telephones. Security can be provided by
firewalls and devices which do not want to receive calls ever, can
use ULA addresses, e.g. printers.

I fully expect that IPv6 firewalls will be standard on any home gateway
device and that they will support a protocol which allows devices to
tell the firewall what kind of incoming connections should be allowed.
This capability will open the market for a whole series of home
network appliances that were not possible before because of NAT.
> But
> allocating a /48 to a home that today uses an IPv4 /30 with a private
> NAT seems beyond humorous.
> It just sounds insane.

You are 10 years too late for this discussion. And it appears that your
IPv6 education could use some updating as well. Check out http://www.getipv6.info
for pointers to various tutorials and documents to get your IPv6 knowledge
up to date.

> Using private addressing that home already
> potentially has access thousands of subnets and millions of addresses.

Sure, but using private addressing it has no access to the Internet or
any network communications outside the local network. Give it a public
/48 and it has both boundless addresses, and communication.

> Just because we have the numbers does not mean we should distribute
> them.

You are 100% right on this point. ARIN does not distribute IPv6 addresses
in these quantities just because we have them. ARIN distributes the addresses
to enable IPv6 network communication in line with the architecture created
by the IETF which requires vast numbers of extra addresses at several points
in the hierarchy to both allow network expansion without readdressing, and
to allow for various types of automatic addressing at the device level.

--Michael Dillon