Kevin Day wrote:
If you include "Web hosting company" in your definition of ISP, that's not true. Unless you're providing connectivity to 200 or more networks, you can't get a /32. If all of your use is internal(fully managed hosting) or aren't selling leased lines or anything, you are not considered an LIR by the current IPv6 policies.
Leased lines are not required. You can assign a /48 to any separate organization you provide connectivity to even if they are colocated. A business model where you don't assign /48's to any customers does seem to preclude being an LIR. Web hosting companies that do assign /48's to some customers would qualify.
Even the proposed ARIN 2006-4 assignment policy for "end sites" doesn't help a lot of small to mid sized hosting companies. For that, to just get a /48, you need to already have a /19 or larger, and be using 80% of that. That's 6553 IPs being utilized. If you're running a managed hosting company (name based vhosts) and deploying 1 IP per web server, you're pretty huge before you've hit 6553 devices. Even assuming 20% of that is wasted, you're still talking about more than 5000 servers. 40 1U servers per rack, you need to have 125 racks of packed to the gills servers before you'd qualify for PI space. That excludes every definition I have of "small-to-medium" in the hosting arena.
The latest revision of 2005-1 is also on the table. It would allow for a /48 assignment for any organization that qualifies for IPv4 space, (even /22). Name based virtual hosting is not required either.
You don't get PI space, and Shim6 is looking like your only alternative for multihoming.
We are only limited by our own imaginations and and by what actually works. This is a hard problem to solve and the solution doesn't have to come from the IETF. - Kevihn