[ppml] Arguments against Policy Proposal: IPv4 Soft Landing

[Durand, Alain]

I would like to articulate several points against the IPv4 soft landing
proposal.

1) This might be just too late to be effective give current projected
end date
   In practice, there could be only 1 or 2 steps, no more.


2) This creates an increase risk of a 'run to the bank' before
   the current set of policies change


3) Increasing allocation efficiency comes with a cost.
   This will mean smaller and smaller prefixes will have to be routed


4) Efficiency above 80%.

   For an organization that does allocation from fairly large blocks
   all the way up to end devices , 80% efficiency is already a very
   high tartget to achieve and it is not feasable to go much above.
   We may shoot for 81 or 82% with great difficulties, but 90% and
   above is irrealistic.
   

5) "Recycling of x% of IPv4 address space formerly used for internal
   infrastructure"

   This may simply not be feasable. A large number of infrastructure
   devices are not upgradable to IPv6 due to physical constraints
   (eg: not enough memory). In environments like the one I'm working
   on, even with the most aggressive IPv6 plans, a very large number
   of legacy infrastructure devices will never be upgraded to IPv6.
   The new ones will, not the legacy ones.

   More generally, I would like to stress that ARIN has no business
   to mandate that an organization be forced into a hardware change.


 6) "* Documented availability of production IPv6 infrastructure
services
     * Documented availability of production IPv6 connectivity service"

    This doesn't mean very much. Anybody can set up a web server
    with a 6to4 address and claim it satisfy this requirement!

    What you would really want is to say something along the lines
    of the requester should offer IPv6 service on par with IPv4 service
    But again, this may be problematic for legacy services... so
    one thing could be to ask that new services offered
    in IPv4 would also be offered on IPv6... but again,
    this may be looked as ARIN imposing a particular business model


Given all the above points, I'm not in favor of this policy.

        - Alain.

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Alain Durand
Director - IPv6 architect
Comcast / Office of the CTO