Stephen Sprunk wrote:
Thus spake "Donald Stahl" <don@calis.blacksun.org>
Current policy allows for greater-than-/48 PI assignments if the org can justify it. However, since we haven't told staff (via policy) what that justification should look like, they are currently approving all requests and several orgs have taken advantage of that.
I can't imagine what an end-user could come up with to justify more than a /48 but what do I know.
First of all, there's disagreement about the definition of "site",
The general definition of a site that I find appropriate is and works pretty well as a rule of thumb: "A site is defined by it having a single administrative domain". As such, if you have for example an NREN, most likely every University will have their own Networking Department, with their own administrators of that network. As such, every university is a site. When the University is very large, it will have multiple administrative portions, eg generally Computer Science will have their own folks managing the network. When you have a large company, the company is also split over several administrative sites, in some cases you might have a single administrative group covering several sites though, this allows you to provide them with a single /48 as they are one group they will know how to properly divide that address space up. It comes sort of close to an AS actually, except that an AS tends to cover a lot of sites.
some folks hold the opinion that means physical location. Thus, if you have 100 sites, those folks would claim you have justified 100 /48s (or one /41). Other folks, like me, disagree with that, but there are orgs out there that have tens of thousands of locations with a need for multiple subnets per location, and that could justify more than a /48 as well via pure subnet counts.
If you have 40k sites, then a /32 is a perfect fit for you. There are not too many organizations that come close to that though, making /32's excellent for most organizations, except the very small ones. These can request a /48, or something upto a /40 for that purpose. Greets, Jeroen