This is the most weaselly-worded clause of any RIR policy I've read.
Let's examine what possibilities there are: plan vs requirement: 1. Specify that a plan should exist to deploy x number of v6 sites within y years: this is nonsense from the point of view that anyone can create a plan to deploy anything, regardless of whether this plan is in any grounded in reality. This comes back to the "do we lie to the RIR" issue. 2. Specify that an immediate requirement exist for x amount of v6 sites right now: this is probably worse in the sense that the RIR has no way to validate this type of claim and that it will end up with more porky pies being told to the RIR. 3. Specify that all LIRs who request a first ipv6 allocation are given a /32. No particular justification required, except that the space be used for routing ipv6 traffic on the internet. "reasonable number" vs "at least x". 1. "at least x" has been proved to be completely meaningless in practice. In fact, it's become such an problem that not only do oranisations endemically lie about it, people openly admit to lying about it. This is an extraordinary situation, to put it diplomatically. 2. "reasonable number" is weasly, no doubt about it, but if a utilisation requirement be added, what's the option here? 200x/48 is a very large amount of deployment space if you're a small LIR with only a couple of customer, but you multihome and have a valid business/technical reason for anb ipv6 allocation. But if you're a huge enterprise organisation or a tier-1 transit provider or something, 200 x /48 might be very small. "reasonable" is suitably meaningless to cover both situations. I mean, what are we actually trying to do here? Do we want LIRs to have easy access to v6 space or not? Why don't we just scrap this requirement completely and say that all LIRs can apply for and receive an ipv6 /32, so long as its primary purpose is for routing ipv6 packets on their and their customers networks (simply to avoid ipv6 registry space being used for other non-related purposes where global uniqueness is a requirement). Is this substantially different from the de-facto situation at the moment? It certainly involves fewer lies and much less pretence on the part of the RIR (if the RIR can be reasonably blamed for its policies and I'm not saying that it should be).
Niall, who apologises for the excessive markup
For your excessive markup, you're buying coffee next time. :-) Nick