If the ops community doesn't provide enough addresses and a way to use them then the vendors will do the same thing they did in v4. It's not clear to me where their needs don't coincide in this case.
there are three legs to the tripod
network operator user equipment manufacturer
They have (or should have) a mutual interest in:
Transparent and automatic configuration of devices. The assignment of globally routable addresses to internet connected devices the user having some control over what crosses the boundry between their network and the operators.
Yes, well, that sounds fine, but I think that we've already hashed over at least some of the pressures on businesses in this thread. I've tried to focus on what's in the Subject:, and have mostly ignored other problems, which would include things such as cellular service, where I suspect that the service model is such that they'll want to find a way to allocate users a /128 ... There is, further, an effect which leads to "equipment mfr" being split into "netwk equipment mfr" and "cpe equipment mfr", because the CPE guys will be trying to build things that'll work for the end user, working around any brokenness, etc. The problem space is essentially polarized, between network operators who have their own interests, and users who have theirs. So, as /engineers/ for the network operators, the question is, what can we do to encourage/coerce/force the businesses on our side of the equation to allocate larger rather than smaller numbers of bits, or find other solutions? What could we do to encourage, or better yet, mandate, that an ISP end- user connection should be allocated a minimum of /56, even if it happens to be a cellular service? ( :-) ) What do we do about corporate environments, or any other environment where there may be pressure to control topology to avoid "DHCP PD" to devices added to the network on an ad-hoc basis? Is it actually an absolutely unquestionable state of affairs that the smallest autoconfigurable subnet is a /64? Because if not, there are options there ... but of course, that leads down a road where an ISP may not want to allocate as much as a /64 ... What parts of this can we tackle through RIR policy? RFC requirements? Best practice? Customer education? ( :-) ) Other ideas? ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.