On 9 Dec 2021, at 10:29, Jeroen Massar via ipv6-wg <ipv6-wg@ripe.net> wrote:

Any LIR could simply take a /32 out of their prefix and delegate it for "disconnected use"... seeing that there are bunches of LIRs doing that kind of 'business' already, .... solved problem all of it, not?

All,

This sentence triggered me, knowing that back in the days we had looked at it. So a colleague was kind enough to cobble together some fresh scripts and put the two data sets next to each other…

At the moment we count 24043 IPv6 allocations and assignments, comparing those to the routing information collected by RIS:

8773  are seen as exact match in RIS
2648  have at least one "more specific" route in RIS
12622  are not seen at all

Now of course no doubt RIS has a few blindspots, so there is a level of inaccuracy here, also because this is based on a single snapshot taken somewhere yesterday afternoon, which means we may have come across an outage somewhere.

Anyway, ballpark 50% of the IPv6 space could be categorised as "disconnected". As we probably all very well know, deployment takes time so probably soe of these are "in the pipeline" and hopefully will be seen and "connected" very soon.

Yet, in my personal view the number is still somewhat high. There might be a few who purposely choose not to announce (all of) their IPv6 address space. But I suspect that is not the 12k+ we observe right now. Maybe not to far off to conclude that the address allocations outpace deployments or turning that on its side: "getting address space is not the cause of the delayed deployment".

I just leave it here as a datapoint, but if anybody has any bright ideas to get more space visible because of deployment, no doubt many are interested.

Best,

MarcoH
PS: thanks Rene!