Michael.Dillon@radianz.com writes:
If these policies cause 2000::/3 to be exhausted then there are 7 more tries left to do it all over again.
This is the essential characteristic of IPv6 that so many of us, weaned on IPv4, seem to forget. We need to keep this fact uppermost in our minds at all times. Even this subset of IPv6 is much bigger than the IPv4 space. So we can afford to be generous and, in fact, we can afford to make mistakes. If we err, we should err on the side of being slightly too generous because if 2000::/3 runs out, we can try again, older but wiser.
I have a very basic problem with this view point. It becomes an excuse to brush aside serious concerns about a particular policy under the "well, if we botch it, we can try again later" argument. It's one thing to have a fall back plan to deal with unforeseen problems. It's quite another to recklessly move in a direction with significant long-term implications just because "we can always try again later".
This means that we should not be excessively concerned with conserving address space or wasting addresses. It is entirely appropriate to give a /32 to anyone who might be some sort of an ISP, either traditional or some new type, like Google or BMW or Cadburys.
And, do you have an estimate of how many such "ISPs" exist today, or will exist in 10-20 years? E.g., are we talking about 10,000 entities (not scary), or 1 million (scary to me). Thomas