On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 7:12 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:
Is it true that there is no existing work on this? If that is the case, why would we not try to steer any such future work in such a way that it can manage to do what the end-user wants without requiring a /48 in their home?
No, it is not true.
Can you give any example of a product, or on-going work? I have read two posts from you today saying that something either exists already, or is being worked on. I haven't read this anywhere else.
I suppose that limiting enough households to too small an allocation will have that effect. I would rather we steer the internet deployment towards liberal enough allocations to avoid such disability for the future.
Have we learned nothing from the way NAT shaped the (lack of) innovation in the home?
I am afraid we may not have learned from exhausting IPv4. If I may use the Hurricane Electric tunnel broker as an example again, supposing that is an independent service with no relation to your hosting, transit, etc. operations, it can justify a /24 allocation immediately under 2011-3, without even relying on growth projections. That's a middle ground figure that we can all live with, but it is based on you serving (at this moment) only 8000 tunnels at your busiest tunnel gateway. If your tunnel gateways could serve 12,288 + 1 users each, then your /24 justification grows to a /20. So you would have a pretty significant chunk of the available IPv6 address space for a fairly small number of end-users -- about 72,543 at present. It isn't hard to do some arithmetic and guess that if every household in the world had IPv6 connectivity from a relatively low-density service like the above example, we would still only burn through about 3% of the IPv6 address space on end-users (nothing said about server farms, etc. here) but what does bother me is that the typical end-user today has one, single IP address; and now we will be issuing them 2^16 subnets; yet it is not too hard to imagine a future where the global IPv6 address pool becomes constrained due to service-provider inefficiency. I would like to have innovations in SOHO devices, too; who knows what these may be. But I fear we may repeat the mistake that caused NAT to be a necessity in IPv4 -- exhausting address space -- by foolishly assuming that every household is going to need twenty-four orders of magnitude more public addresses than it has today. That is what these practices do -- they literally give end-users twenty-four orders of magnitude more addresses, while it is easy to imagine that we will come within one order of magnitude of running completely out of IPv6 addresses for issuing to service providers. I didn't know what the digit "1" followed by twenty-four zeroes was called. I had to look it up. So our end-users will be receiving about one-Septillion addresses to use in their home, but no one seems to be asking what future technology we may be harming by possibly constraining the global address pool. -- Jeff S Wheeler <jsw@inconcepts.biz> Sr Network Operator / Innovative Network Concepts