nanog mailing list archives

Re: IPv6 Default Allocation - What size allocation are you giving out


From: David Conrad <drc () virtualized org>
Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2014 19:21:00 -0700

Erik,

On Oct 8, 2014, at 6:18 PM, Erik Sundberg <ESundberg () nitelusa com> wrote:
I guess the idea of handing a customer /56 (256 /64s) or  a /48 (65,536 /64s) just makes me cringe at the waste.

Don’t cringe. Yeah, a /48 is a crazy amount of space, but that isn’t the resource we are likely to ever need to 
conserve in the lifetime of IPv6 (well, modulo insane allocation policies the RIR communities could potentially create, 
but hopefully rational folks will stop that. Hopefully).  If you’re concerned, do the math: e.g., assume a couple of 
orders of magnitude more allocations per year than the current IPv4 burn rate, assume an IPv6 /48 = an IPv4 /32 and 
then see how many decades the existing /3 of global unicast IPv6 will last.

The real issue is how we’re going to scale routing. Allocating /48s to all your customers out of your /32 (or /28 or 
whatever the default ISP allocation is this week) won’t affect that in any significant way.

And besides, allocating all your customers a standard size should make your provisioning systems a lot easier, allowing 
you to conserve what’s really important...

Regards,
-drc



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