On 4-Feb-2009, at 16:16, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
I guess I was thinking about v4 modems which do not get a subnet, just an IP address. If we really are handing out a /64 to each DSL & Cable modem, then we may very well be recreating the same problem.
All the advice I have heard about address assignment to broadband subscribers is to give each subscriber a /56, in addition to the link address (which is effectively a /128). The last time I looked, the v6 allocation of every RIR apart from ARIN recommended a /48 instead of a /56. I have been specifically advised against assigning a /64 per subscriber on the grounds that it is short-sighted, since v6 residential gateways, when they come in large numbers, will expect to be able to assign addresses to more than one subnet in the customer network.
And before anyone says "there are 281474976710656 /48s!", just remember your history.
The pertinent numbers given the thinking above are 2^24 == 16,777,216 customer /56 assignments , or 2^16 == 65536 customer /48 assignments per /32 allocation from an RIR. (If a /32 is all you have, then you will want to reserve some of that space for your own infrastructure, and the numbers above will be slightly higher than reality.) I see people predicting that giving everybody a /56 is insane and will blow out routing tables. I don't quite understand that; at the regional ISP with which I am most familiar 40,000 or so internal/ customer routes in BGP, and I have not noticed anything fall over. This is 2008: we are not dealing with routers maxed out with 256MB of RAM. And this is without any attempt to aggregate per LNS, or per POP. (This regional ISP is close to being able to provide responses to IPV6CP requests for all customers to establish an interface id, ND/RA to assign a link address, and DHCPv6 PD on request, for all customers; it's working in the lab, but hasn't yet been rolled out on the production access routers, which are all Juniper E-series devices. No, there's no direct revenue in it today; yes, the vast majority of customers are probably using XP or a residential gateway that will never talk v6.) If you need to worry about the impact on your internal routing tables of internal customer growth, then it seems you should be more worried about the impact on your routing tables of growth in the global v4 table (which is surely more rapid, and arguably can be expected to accelerate as v4 exhaustion leads to imaginative inter-organisation address assignment for fee).
I was not there when v4 was spec'ed out, but I bet when someone said "four-point-two BILLION addresses", someone else said "no $@#%'ing way we will EVER use THAT many...."
I suspect that for many regional ISPs a single allocation sufficient to number 16 million customers is probably good enough. In Canada, for example, that's half the total population, and probably larger than the total number of residences. No doubt there are a countable and significant number of super-ISPs in larger markets (or spanning multiple markets) that have requirements that out-strip that of a single /32, but I feel comfortable predicting that they are the minority in the grand scheme of things (and in any case, they can always request a larger allocation). Joe