HPH, The other reason why there is an allocation policy for exchange points (at least in the ARIN region) is because the folks who are building exchange points may not have enough of them to justify the minimum allocation. It seemed reasonable that they would need provider independent space, however, so they can get it with the provisions written in the policy. If you think about a neutral exchange point provider who's business is to connect up providers to peer, etc, that exchange point provider may want or need to supply the IP addresses for that exchange point. They're providing a service and may want to provide the address space as well. I can't speak for the exchange providers, but setting up p2p vlans or whatever for folks connected to the same ethernet switch may be time consuming and also can waste quite a bit of address space (if you're using /30s for p2p links and not /31s, per the new yet unimplemented draft). I hope this helps! ---CJ From: "Hans Petter Holen" <hph@online.no> Subject: IPv6 addresses for EP or why are exhanges so special ? I have tried to follow this discussion, and stumbeled over a fundamental question when trying to reason about this: * why are exchange points so special ? It seems to me that shared medium exchange points historicaly have used a single subnet to interconnect. Generaly it simplifies configuration and eases operations to have a single logical interface on the physical interface connected to the shared medium. But in order to excange traffic with other partners at the exchange one needs to establish "pont to point" BGP peerings. So there is no longer any significant configuirational advantage in having all the boxes I want to talk to on a single subnet (I still need to figure out how to talk to the others by establishing BGP peerings.) On the operational side, at least back when I was directly involved in such, it would actualy be very convenient to have logical point to point links with all my peering partners in order to better diagnose and measure traffic flows and flaws. If this is the case, the IP addresses for the logical point to point links across the exchange would best be implementedwith IP addresses from any of the providers, or perhaps even the IPv6 equivalent of link local addresses. I would be interested to hear comments on this approach, because if this model makes senseto implement, it would probably make sense to document this as some kind of "best current practice" for IP v6 exchanges in order to make sure that the router vendors implements the proper tools to make this easy to configure. Looking forward to hear others opinions on this. -hph