Dear Colleagues, As I have announced at the last RIPE meeting, I am posting for your information the ETNO Common Position on IPv6 policy, to be used as an input into the ongoing discussions on this issue. For those who have not attended the last WG meeting, ETNO is the principal European trade association of network operators, gathering 45 operators and LIRs at the same time (www.etno.be). It includes both historic operators and new entrants. Some of them already have been granted IPv6 addresses. I have been chairing the Naming, Addressing and Numbering Issues (NANI) WG of ETNO for some years. The following position has been signed up by all 45 members of ETNO, further to the drafting work led by Niall. It is now available on the ETNO site at http://www.etno.be/ETNO positions/latest position papers. ETNO supports /29 because it is consistent with the current allocation policy as defined by the RIRs and better fits the LIRs' needs than the current /35. Indeed, ETNO considers /29 as a minimum allocation size to allow a sub-TLA registry to run its activities efficiently. The rationale for a wider address block for operators acting as LIRs lies in aggregation, efficiency of routing tables and better management of address space by TLA registries. These registries need enough space to serve their customers and NLA registries in the best possible way. Quote "ETNO Common Position on IPv6 addressing policy The foreseeable needs for public addresses for the coming years, especially for UMTS, DSL, cable modems� is a source of concern for operators and the Internet community as a whole. According to BT's estimates presented at the RIPE 38 meeting in Amsterdam and agreed by the participants, it can be expected that the IPv4 space will reach exhaustion in the most likely case around 2005 - 2007. Therefore, it is in the Internet community's interest to stimulate at the soonest a broad usage of IPv6 addresses, where no shortage should exist in theory. It is the ETNO opinion that such stimulation can only be obtained by setting up rules of management of IPv6 addresses that would avoid at the same time: � to introduce artificial limitations that might hamper the move to Ipv6, � an exaggerated increase of routing tables. However, ETNO notes the current policies consisting of the: � allocation to Top Level Aggregation (TLA) registries of /35 addressing space � reservation by the RIRs of six additional bits together with the new proposal for the systematic assignment of /48 to end users potentially running sub networks, as agreed at RIPE 37. This does not allow TLA registries to efficiently manage their addressing space in a long term perspective, nor to properly allocate addresses to their Next Level Aggregation (NLA) registries and assign addresses to end users, since their available space is reduced to 13 bits. ETNO favours a structure that permits maximum aggregation. This would enable operators and ISPs to structure their addressing plan in a long-term perspective. Therefore ETNO strongly supports the idea presented at RIPE 38 to allocate from now on /29 to all TLA registries, including the existing ones. In the same spirit of facilitating a timely move to IPv6, ETNO also suggests that the opportunity be taken at the end of the bootstrap period, expected end 2001, to review and ease the conditions for registries to be allocated IPv6 addresses." Unquote Jean-Marc Colomb Chairman ETNO NANI WG