On Tue, 4 Sep 2001, Andrew Partan wrote:

...

AIUI the reason for restricting who gets sub TLAs is... If everyone (multihomed customers) gets a sub TLA then the default-free routing table fills up with multihomed customer sub TLAs and IPv6 routing tables are as cluttered and unscalable as IPv4.

Bingo! Thats the real reason. The only known way of keeping routing working is keeping the tables small. There is no known technical means of doing this at the moment, so we are forced into the administrative realm. Thus you see all sorts of rules & regulations about addreses and how to get them and use them.

This comes close to making sense - until you realise that RIPE's rules for allocating IPv6 address space are MORE stringent than those used for allocating IPv4 address space. If the rule was that the fact that RIPE had allocated IPv4 address space automatically qualified an ISP for an allocation of IPv6 addresses, then its obvious that the IPv6 routing tables would grow no faster than the IPv4 tables [1]. But in fact what we have are much more restrictive rules for allocations from a very much larger address space. This is not easily explained as the consequence of rational policies on the allocation of address space. But it is an obvious consequence of one might call the Galbavy Rule: the urge to regulate is independent of any practical need for regulation. [2] NOTE: [1] Of course RIPE assignment policies mean that most ISPs will come to have multiple IPv4 address blocks, whereas they would have only one IPv6 block, so the IPv6 routing table should grow much more slowly than the IPv4 routing table. [2] And one should not forget that once you get your IPv6 prefix, you should never have to go back to RIPE again, depriving the regulators of anything to do. -- Jim Dixon VBCnet GB Ltd http://www.vbc.net tel +44 117 929 1316 fax +44 117 927 2015

On Wed, 5 Sep 2001, Peter Willis wrote:

Colleagues,

Why don't we give every LIR an IPv6 TLA without any further qualification? There's only 2859 LIRs in RIPE! How many in the World? Somewhere between 8000 and 16000? I've seen figures suggesting there's only 15K ISPs in the World. 16K routes is a lot less than 100K+.

Indeed. In fact, if the policy was simply to give an IPv6 TLA to any LIR who asked for one, it's likely that perhaps 10% would apply. So a negligible 300 or so additional IPv6 routes and a negligible amount of paperwork -- in fact this could just be handled by a robot hanging off www.ripe.net. The only work involved is writing the script.

Of course we have to fix the multihoming problem to keep the number of routes down. But even if we only give TLAs to the few global tier 1 transit providers if we don't fix the multihoming problem we will end up with a huge number of routes. So the problem is to fix multihoming with a technical solution and not to manage the problem through regulation.

Precisely.

Peter Willis. BTexact Technologies.

-- Jim Dixon VBCnet GB Ltd http://www.vbc.net tel +44 117 929 1316 fax +44 117 927 2015