Dear Colleagues,
When the RIRs and IANA were discussing the /12 allocations, the RIRs claimed one of the reasons they needed /12s was because they would all be using the "bisection method" of allocation to remove the need for reservation. It would be sad to hear RIPE still hadn't followed through.
Again, from my source, since some months or maybe a year, RIPE-NCC allocates IPv6 on "bit-boundry" (or bisection) method, so reservation is not needed anymore. But legacy allocations made us think of /29 :)
For a long time, the RIPE NCC's internal IP address management system would not easily allow us to implement the binary chop algorithm and we made each IPv6 allocation inside a reservation that was three bits larger than the allocation itself, ie. a /32 allocation inside a /29 reservation. In December 2010 we deployed a new system and since then we have been allocating IPv6 using the binary chop algorithm: ripencc|DE|ipv6|2a03:4000::|32|20101202|allocated ripencc|NL|ipv6|2a03:4800::|32|20101215|allocated ripencc|DE|ipv6|2a03:5000::|32|20101207|allocated ripencc|RU|ipv6|2a03:5800::|32|20101215|allocated ripencc|NL|ipv6|2a03:6000::|32|20101202|allocated ripencc|IT|ipv6|2a03:6800::|32|20101215|allocated Eventually, the algorithm will begin allocating in the middle of these available blocks, for example 2a03:4400::/32, 2a03:4c00::/32, etc. Best regards, Alex Le Heux RIPE NCC