Re: Where to buy Internet IP addresses

[Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike () swm pp se>]

On Sun, 3 May 2009, Matthew Moyle-Croft wrote:

> My personal feeling is that 99% of home networks will use a single /64, 
> but we'll be giving out /60s and /56s to placate the 1% who are going to 
> jump up and down and shout at us about it because of some reason that 
> they feel makes it all unfair or that we're "thinking like ipv4 not 
> ipv6" etc.

IPv6 was designed around handing out /48s to everybody. There are 281 
thousand billion /48s in the IPv6 space. We are 6 billion people on the 
earth. If we hand out a /48 to each, we still have a lot to spare (99.999% 
left), then we can decide if this was a problem or not.

> It's possible that home networks will gain some ability (in a standard 
> fashion) to use more than one /64, but I doubt it - it's much easier to do 
> resource discovery on a single broadcast domain for things like printers, 
> file sharing etc.

Don't think now or next year, think in 10 years. Think hundreds of devices 
in your home, you don't want your sensor network to be on the same subnet 
as your computers, and you want a DMZ, and you want your video on a 
separate subnet (because you have cheap switches which do not have MLD 
snooping) etc.

There is NO reason of scarcity to NOT hand out at least a /56 to each end 
user. Stop thinking IPv4 and start to think IPv6, we're going to be living 
with this for tens of years and you have no idea what people want to do in 
the future. Give them the chance to innovate and they (or someone they 
purchase products from) will.

It's short sighted and silly to design your service around handing out 
/64s to people and then you have to redesign it when demand for multiple 
subnets come around. Design it around /56 to begin with, and you will have 
solved the problem for the future, not just for now.

--
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike () swm pp se