[arin-ppml] IPv6 Allocation Planning

[William Herrin]

On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 4:21 PM, Leo Vegoda <leo.vegoda at icann.org> wrote:
> On 9 Aug 2010, at 2:34, Owen DeLong wrote:
>> This is an attempt to head off prefix-growth by allowing ISPs to do planning
>> if they wish.
>
> Why are ISPs not able to plan ahead at the moment?
>
> Regards,
> Leo

Leo,

You're kidding, right?

The current v6 dogma is that we're going to provide ISPs with exactly
one allocation to the maximum extent possible, so we want to get that
one right and/or include reserve slack surrounding the allocation so
that the netmask expands. That's why we haven't organized things as a
slow start.

One problem, of course, is that ISPs are used to planning address
consumption on 6 and 12 month scales, not decades. They have no
practical experience to guide them with longer range planning.

Making matters worse, v6 allocation and v4 allocation have a
fundamentally different basis. V4 allocation is host-centric: you
assign a /32 to a host. V6 allocation is LAN-centric: you assign /64's
to a LAN. ISPs have experience counting hosts. Counting lans is a
little different; it confuses the numbers.

More abstractly speaking, the history of long-range planning in
general is littered with more failure than success. And the successes
tend to focus more on positioning the entity to right-size rather than
pre-determining what the right size is.

And lest we forget: IPv6 is not currently a moneymaker nor anticipated
to soon be a moneymaker, so the funding to support any sort of long
range planning simply isn't there.

Regards,
Bill Herrin


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