On Sun, 9 May 2004, Ulrich Kiermayr wrote:
I would urge you to reconsider. With IPv6 it is expected that almost all assignments to customers will actually be /48 as very very few customers actually need anything more then that (even large companies that currently might have /19 can be fine with /48 ip6).
The problem is that IPSc could (and regarding what I hear would) give out /48s to ther end users [if there is a chance they need more than one subnet]. In our case you would probably end up with ~30000 /48 assigned that way - and as a university we do not have that many DSL end-users.
In your case there is no need to actually provide whois reassignments because the ips are still in use at the university (ok by its students) and it is the same with IPv4. Nor is there reason why large company would provide reassignments on each /48 for each of their employers. Deligations and reassignments to organizations different then the one that received the ip block (from upstream or directly from RIR) or for personal use by end-users (in that case meaning not for use to do business or other similar activity as part of the organization that received ip space) are the only ones I meant as those that are usefull to have in the whois database. Their number would be in the same range of numbers as what is currently entered in whois for IPv4.
But what about the really big ISPs? At the moment the Ripe DB contains slightly over 1.000.000 Objects. if those ISPs register every /48 they assign, you end up with orders of magnitude more objects - and a consderable higher update-rate.
I do not believe we have any reason to worry that number would be too high that RIRs would not be able to handle it as it would be the same type of use as is currently entered in whois for IPv4 that are likely to receive majority of assigned /48s (i.e. reassignments to bussiness with multiple computer networks or to "well networked" homes). Also technology capabilities are still increasing and current databases (as seen based on millions of domains in .com) are quite capable of handling large number of records. Additionally the RIR policies are not meant to be a fixed thing, if you do ever find out that load on whois database due to new records being entered in is growing at the rate too great that it might indanger stability of such database, then obvious reaction on part of RIR and its members would be to modify policies to eliminate this threat (i.e. remove those /48 records from public site then and remove need to enter any more of them).
The deeper reason is that the way IPv6 addresses are handed out and the Space is devided, you can have end-users occupying the same IP space as big companies.
If these end-users have large enough network that they need /48 on public internet as does some large public company, then perhaps they should accept responsibility that comes with it. -- William Leibzon Elan Networks william@elan.net