[arin-ppml] IPv6 Transition Policy (aka Soft Landing)

[Fred Baker]

On Oct 8, 2010, at 9:28 AM, Gary Giesen wrote:

> 1) What sort of mechanism are you going to use to verify IPv6 deployment? While I believe service providers can turn up v6 relatively quickly (if they haven't already done so), getting their customers turned up is another thing...

That is most definitely the case on both counts.

That said, let me throw a hypothetical question to you. Suppose that a hypothetical ISP had 20,000,000 residential/SOHO/SMB customers and a /32 prefix, and worked out a plan to address routers in its network using a ULA and distribute the /32 as some combination of /48's, /52's, and /56's to its customers. It would be in a pretty good position to get some more addresses, I should imagine another /32 - and with any luck, do so by shortening its existing /32 to a /31 or shorter. Were I king (which I note I'm not) I would be able to do the math and say "they will need them whenever they do the deployment" without a lot more proof. My question would not be "so roll them out and renumber your network when you get to a certain deployment level"; my question would be "so show me that with this plan you have deployment in progress, implying that if I give you these addresses now you won't have to renumber your network when you get to that point".

To my admittedly small mind, the objective here is to enable ISPs to use their resources to develop scalable, manageable IPv6 networks. It seems to me like working with them to accomplish that makes some sense. Yes, one needs to verify. But I should think that every ARIN member has an appropriate NDA, and ARIN itself can count the IPv4 address space allocated to the member, to support the discussion.