[ppml] Policy Proposal: IPv6 Assignment Guidelines

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> I think your both naieve to think that your typical corporate 
> customer with a couple hundred nodes and no redundancy to the 
> Internet is going to put up with being told he has to 
> renumber his entire internal network when he decides his 
> current ISP is a chuckhead and decides to go to a competitor.

Perhaps you haven't read RFC 4192? It is not necessary to renumber the
entire internal network to change ISPs. A lot of the number changing
happens automatically, because both ISPs assign a /48 prefix. All
interface addresses are unchanged, only the prefix changes. And this is
accomplished in a two step process where you begin by adding a second
prefix, which results in all interfaces having at least 2 IPv6
addresses. The process is not entirely painless, but it is far less work
than with IPv4.
 
>  I think said customer is going to look at the money that the 
> labor hours would consume to do this, then call up Cisco and 
> offer them
> 1/4 of that, and Cisco will happily take the money and supply 
> a double-translation NAT box that will nat IPv6. 

I don't think you understand Cisco's business model. They don't do low
margin products unless the volume is very high, and the low margin
product supports the sale of high-margin products. I'm sure that various
Chinese manufacturers will supply such boxes because they tend to build
anything that is possible and throw it onto the market to see if there
is demand. But any kind of NAT sacrifices functionality and the cost of
that is probably higher than the cost of IPv6 renumbering.

--Michael Dillon