Hi Owen,
Hi all,
I will like to know, from those deploying IPv6 services to residential customers, if you are planning to provide static or dynamic IPv6 prefixes.
Just to be clear, I'm for static prefix delegation to residential customers, however I heard that some ISPs are doing dynamic delegations, the same way as is common today with IPv4.
I don't thin it make sense, as the main reason for doing so in IPv4 was address exhaustion and legacy oversubscription models such as PPP/dial-up.
well, it does make sense for most of the residential customers nowadays, because they are indoctrinated with this idea of dynamic+NAT == privacy for over a decade now and don't know any better.
IMNSHO, education is always a better alternative than preserving ignorance or worse, mis-information.
I'm fully with you there, probably i should have elaborated a bit more. In general, what Daniel said - at least in germany we have this problem that static vs. dynamic Internet address assignments make a whole lot of a difference in privacy when it comes to legal issues. AND, even though we have next to no IPv6-deployment on a big scale here, there is plenty of "education" going on in various media about how IPv6 will kill privacy with "life-long IP addresses" and so on. It's just not possible to counter that with technical arguments, at least not in the short-term. I apologize for generalizing the situation in germany without explaining. I really hope it's different in other markets and you are right. But you will lose customers here if you don't offer some kind of dynamic prefixes, and if you're dealing with the mass-market, you can't afford that. Hence, my suggestion to just let your customers chose. Problem solved.
The best current practice would be, to default to a dynamic prefix, but enable your more advanced customers to change that to a static prefix at will in your customer service web-portal or something.
Sounds unnecessarily complicated and with absolutely no benefit whatsoever.
In this case, i beg to differ though. It's not complicated but as easy as some change in your RADIUS database. And, in contrast to things like NAT66, it doesn't break anything. So, in my opinion, this is about giving the customers a choice, with no downsides. It's somewhat similar to "privacy extensions - yes or no? default or not?" in the end. One could discuss what the default should be, dynamic or static. But just handing out static addresses even though it's relatively easy to give your customers a choice, might be seen as "dictating" rather than "educating". On a side-note: It's totally different with NAT of course, giving the people the choice to use NAT will break things in the internet, again. I never would opt for that.
But i have no idea how to sell this to your marketing department. They again are usually used to sell static IPs for an extra fee, and usually don't want to change that with IPv6. That's bullshit for IPv6 of course.
It was mostly bullshit for IPv4.
Selling IPs? Indeed. But there's nothing in any RIR policy to prevent that (anymore). -- Mit freundlichen Grüßen / Kind Regards Sascha Lenz [SLZ-RIPE] Senior System- & Network Architect