[ppml] And as for assignments...

[Jonathan Barker]

And to create a little controversy...

For an additional 2 cents... a /46, /52, /64 - all of these are 
excessive for a home user. Our core router can handle 1,000,000 IPv4, 
and 500,000 IPv6 routes - and that's with today's technology. Our 7613 
need not see all the routes we distribute to our DSL / Wireless 
customers. Those can / will be aggregated into blocks before they hit 
the core.. just as our aggregation routers don't see any public BGP 
routes.  From there we'll aggregate again into our /32 prefix 2607:F100 
- which is how the global Internet will see us. We'll probably end up 
assigning /120s to individual homes, where subnetting is likely to never 
occur, and multi-homing isn't a realistic possibility. I know with my 
current DirecTV, XBOX, PS3, Vista Media Centers at home all 
participating on my network, they do not like being in separate subnets. 
Everything is happiest when they do not need to go through any sort of 
routing appliance to get to each other. A single block of 256 addreses - 
that'd put every device in my house in a nice discrete container, and 
still let me add in my refrigerator, oven, lamps, water heater - what 
ever you'd actually want to assign an address to.

That being said, even if people could assign v6 to every device in their 
home... Would you really want to? Do people really need to know or care 
that their water heater is currently on or off? Wouldn't it be a nice 
surprise to find that overnight, their water heater had been hacked - 
and it was now set to 'off' just before their morning shower? 
Personally, despite being a huge technophile who loves to use SNMP to 
graph power consumption, temperature, humidity... I really don't think I 
want my water heater on publicly addressable space.

Assigning a /64 to a home... or 2^64th addresses... which is the number 
of IPv4 addreses available on the Internet today - SQUARED... Surely I'm 
not the only person who thinks that's just crazy. I understand the 
desire to decrease the number of routes. I can see if you have a just a 
regular Cisco sup720 you're probably worried about the health of your 
hardware due to the 256,000 IPv4 route limit - and the fact that we have 
224,966 global BGP routes at the moment. But... isn't the best answer to 
upgrade the hardware that's causing the limit, rather than implementing 
a company-wide policy that will be deliberately wasteful forever? It's a 
whole lot easier to change out a supervisor card, and upgrade some 
aggregation routers, than to get all your customers to renumber because 
one day ARIN may realize that 2^64 addresses for a residence is a highly 
wasteful use of resources, and decides to deny an ISP's request to add 
another allocation.

Having said all that - This e-mail has a definitely different take on 
the issue from most all the e-mails I've read.

My question is - What is wrong with my logic, in that most people who 
are commenting don't think in these terms?

Jonathan