As I see it, this is probably the cleanest sumary of the entire discussion so far. And the one that make most sense to. On Tue, 10 May 2005, Daniel Roesen wrote:
On Tue, May 10, 2005 at 01:21:52PM +0100, Carlos Friacas wrote:
I also didnt get the renumbering issue... renumbering from a /56 to a /48 should be painless...
It isn't. Making smaller default assingments like /56 makes only sense if you do NOT keep a whole /48 to grow the /56 to. So essetially you'll face networks with exceed 256 subnets which then need to renumber ALL of them. There isn't supposed to be _additional_ space, only larger replacement.
And a network addressing plan designed to /56 and now approaching limits _does_ look different to a /48 plan, so people _will_ have to redesign their addressing plan while renumbering the whole network from the old /56 to the new /48. This is all the hassle (even more!) of IPv4... The whole point of /48 is to _avoid_ that as much as possible.
But indeed, I don't see SOHO/home networks outgrow a /56 in the foreseeable future. If technologies come up which do mandate/foster high amounts of subnetting even in the SOHO/home space, the default SOHO/home assignment size can be raised again - which will introduce some pain, but not that much.
Giving /56s to corporate networks is IMHO just plain wrong and "IPv6 not understood".
And don't forget, upgrading your assignment from /56 to /48 WILL have a price tag attached to it. ISPs _still_ try to squeeze out revenue from artificial address space scarcity. As Tony pointed out, the business agenda of "product differentiation" is a/the big driver of this move.
Providing better service than the competition is just too oldschool it seems. :-)
Best regards, Daniel
-- ------------------------------ Roger Jorgensen | rogerj@stud.cs.uit.no | - IPv6 is The Key! http://www.jorgensen.no | roger@jorgensen.no -------------------------------------------------------