With apologies for the time that it's taken me to get this posted to the list, here is an attempt to summarise the discussions which took place among the approx. 180 people attending the Local IR working group at RIPE41 on 16th January 2002. Although many of those attending the working group had read the published draft, | IPv6 Address Allocation and Assignment Global Policy | Draft of December, 22 2001 | Version 2001-12-22 | APNIC | ARIN | RIPE - NCC we started this session with a presentation by Mirjam Kuehne from the RIPE NCC (http://www.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/archive/ripe-41/presentations/ipv6-mir/) which summarised the main points of the current document. Most of the discussion centered on section 5.2 of the draft related to the Initial Allocation Criteria and Initial Allocation Size | 5.2.1. Initial allocation criteria | | A requesting organization can receive an initial allocation by | demonstrating that it has an immediate (i.e., within next three | months) requirement for at least a /36 prefix. That is, immediately | after the allocation, the organization will have 776 or more sites in | need of address assignments. 776 is the number of /48 address blocks | that can be assigned out of a /36 address block to achieve an HD- | Ratio of 0.8. The HD-Ratio is an address allocation utilization | metric proposed in RFC 3194 as an adaptation of the H-Ratio | originally defined in [RFC1715]. (See also Section 5.3.3.) | | [Note: discussion is needed as to whether justification for need of a | /36 is reasonable initial starting point, or whether the criteria of | an immediate need to address 776 sites is too high. Note also, that | once a request for an initial allocation has been granted, the | minimum allocation (i.e., /32) is provided, even though the requestor | has not justified a need for such a large amount of space.] The general consensus at the meeting was that this placed too high a barrier to registries at a time when getting real IPv6 deployment underway was seen as becoming more urgent. Several alternatives were discussed, but the one which seemed to achieve almost complete consensus from those at the meeting involved dropping the "776 or more sites" and HD-Ratio requirements completely. The proposal can be summarised as: "For a limited period (no more than the first 2000 allocations in each RIR area was suggested), a requesting registry (either a LIR or NIR in the draft's terminology) would receive a /32 minimum allocation from the appropriate RIR on the documentation of at least one /48 assignment." This is just one way of removing the barrier imposed in the current draft... there are, of course, other possibilities which weren't discussed at the meeting. This lowers the barrier to whatever policies the RIRs have in place for the establishment of new local or national registries. The aim was seen as being to obtain global consensus based on the current draft as an *interim* policy, with final policy being worked on as experience was gained during the "2000*3 allocations" period. Time was such that discussion of other sections of the draft were only covered briefly, if at all. James Aldridge (Co-chair, RIPE LIR WG)