On Wed, Jan 15, 2003 at 15:37:27 +0100, Gert Doering wrote:
Just calling those parties ISPs will not solve the dilemma. A big company that wants to give IP connectivity to their employees (like the RIPE NCC does) is not an "ISP" in the classic sense, as it's not their main business.
On the other hand, if you call everybody that happens to offer an ISDN S0 for dialup to their employees purposes an ISP, then most of our business customers could be called ISPs - which defeats the "one /48 for end sites" rule again.
I agree. Maybe the difference is how the home network is connected? For most people, the normal conenctivity is via traditional ISPs. They get a /48 from that ISP. They may also have some kind of connectivity (VPN or dialup) to their company network. But I think that's mostly used for "secure" access to company services. Usually one /64 out of the company prefix will be enough. The company does not need to assign /48s to its employees. University xDSL, cable and fiber networks are different. Usually, it's the only connectivity for the students or employee. And they prefer to get /48. In this case the university can be seen as an ISP. I think some uncertainty comes from the fact that most ISPs are still not offering IPv6 services and people are trying to get an IPv6 prefix somewhere else.
I still don't think that it's very easy to define a given business relation as "this is an end-end-end customer", and "that is an ISP".
Thinking more about it, I agree. rvdp