[ppml] Policy Proposal 2005-8: Proposal to amend ARIN IPv6 assignment and utilisation requirement - to be revised

[Member Services]

The ARIN Advisory Council (AC), acting under the provisions of the ARIN
Internet Resource Policy Evaluation Process (IRPEP), has reviewed policy
proposal 2005-8 and has determined that while there is no community
consensus in favor of the proposal there is consensus that the proposal
should be revised and discussed further. The AC made this determination
at their meeting at the conclusion of the ARIN Public Policy meeting on
October 27, 2005. The results of the AC meeting were reported by the
Chair of the AC at the member meeting. This report can be found at
http://www.arin.net/meetings/minutes/ARIN_XVI/mem.html

The AC will work with the author of the proposal to make the community
suggested revisions and return the proposal to the ppml for further
discussion.

The current policy proposal text is provided below and is also available
at http://www.arin.net/policy/proposals/2005_8.html

The ARIN Internet Resource Policy Evaluation Process can be found at
http://www.arin.net/policy/irpep.html

Regards,

Member Services
American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)


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Policy Proposal 2005-8: Proposal to amend ARIN IPv6 assignment and
utilisation requirement

Policy statement

It is proposed to make the following changes to the existing ARIN IPv6
policy:

    1. Define an additional end site assignment size of /56. This /56
assignment should be considered the general case, intended for small
office, household, and personal networks, and other small and
medium-sized deployments where the number of potential subnets exceeds
1, but is not expected to exceed 256.
    2. Amend the existing policy regarding /48 end-site assignments to
refer specifically to assignments to large enterprise and corporate
end-site environments where there is a requirement for more than 255
subnets at the end site.
    3. Amend the evaluation threshold calculation to be based on a
default end site assignment size of a /56. Further end-site assignment
information should be provided to ARIN in order to use a different
average end-site assignment size for HD-ratio calculation purposes.

Policy Rationale

The key benefit of IPv6 is its large address space, and a fundamental
assumption motivating its adoption is that with IPv6, sufficient address
space will always be available to ensure that users can obtain sufficent
public address space for their needs. Projections for IPv6 address
consumption over the next 50-100 years indicate that there are scenarios
(depending on one's assumptions) in which a signficant percentage of the
total IPv6 address space could be handed out, raising the possibility
that address allocation policies will then need to be revised to become
significantly more conservative to ensure that the IPv6 address space
does not become exhausted. Given the IPv4 experience, in which early
adopters were able to acquire large amounts of address space easily, but
later adopters were not, and the resultant problems this has caused, it
would be preferable to take steps now to signficantly reduce the
likelyhood of ever needing to make such a change, especially if changes
can be made with minimal impact.

The RIR communities adopted address allocation policies in 2002 in which
the default assignment to end sites was assumed to be a /48 in many
cases. For SOHO users (e.g., home users and small businesses), being
given enough address space to number 65,536 subnets seems excessive
given their anticipated needs. Changing the default assignment size to a
/56 allows for numbering 256 subnets, still a large number. Making such
a change would save roughly two orders of magnitude of address space.
That is, for any projection made assuming a /48 assignment, assigning
/56s instead would result in roughly 100 times less total consumption.

The goal of this policy proposal is not to make it impossible for end
sites to obtain a /48. Rather, it is intended to make the default
assignment size a /56 in the vast number of cases where a /48 seems
profligate. In those cases where the end site can argue that it has a
need for more than 256 subnets, a /48 should be given out.

Background information:

"Issues Related to the Management of IPv6 Address Space", by Thomas Narten.
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-narten-iana-rir-ipv6-considerations-00.txt

Similar policy proposal submitted to APNIC (includes detailed background
and pointers to more background information than is included here).
http://www.apnic.net/docs/policy/discussions/prop-031-v001.txt

State of related discussion in other RIRs: See section "Situation in
other RIRs" in
http://www.apnic.net/docs/policy/discussions/prop-031-v001.txt

IETF revisitation of RFC 3177 "IAB/IESG Recommendations on IPv6 Address
Allocations to Sites", the document in which the case for assigning /48s
was made.
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-narten-ipv6-3177bis-48boundary-00.txt
(note: this document was adopted as a WG item by the IPv6 WG at IETF
63 in August.)

Timetable for implementation: Immediate (upon approval)