On Jul 15, 2015, at 03:43 , Baldur Norddahl <baldur.norddahl@gmail.com> wrote:
On 15 July 2015 at 01:34, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:
For one thing a /32 is nowhere near enough for anything bigger than a modest ISP today. Many will need /28, /24, or even larger. The biggest ones probably need /16 or even /12 in some cases.
What is the definition of a modest and a large ISP?
In the RIPE region even the smallest ISP can get a /29 with no documentation necessary. But likely that is all they will ever get because policy requires that you use that /29 at about 30% efficiency if you do /48 allocations to end users.
Which is fine… 30% of a /29 at /48 is 524,288 end-sites served. For a residential provider, I’d say that’s a medium-sized provider. A large provider would be one that serves several million end-sites. There are at least a handful of providers in the US for example, that have 10,000,000+ customers. A /29 wouldn’t be enough for them. RIPEs policy ignores the inefficiencies created by topology and that’s kind of unfortunate in my opinion, but so far it doesn’t appear too egregious, so I haven’t taken the time to propose better policy.
You would need more than a million users to get a /24.
Sure. Many ISPs have more than a million end-sites (note end-sites != users). In many cases customer and end-site are synonymous, but in many cases, a single customer may have many end-sites. For example, a business which has several buildings in a campus may treat each building as an end-site. A multi-tenant building would likely treat each tenant as a separate end-site. etc.
I do not think the RIPE region has an ISP large enough to apply for a /16 or anything near it.
Perhaps. There are at least 2 ISPs in the US that I know of with 20,000,000+ customers. Since the NA in NANOG stands for North America, I kind of figured that the situation in North America ought to be considered somewhat relevant.
Therefore we can conclude that if ARIN manages to use up all the /3 address space currently reserved for allocation, we will still be able to get address space in Europe for the next thousands years :-). It is thought that RIPE will not use up the /12 that IANA allocated to RIPE - ever.
I doubt even with our current policy, ARIN is unlikely to use up the /12 in my lifetime or even in the lifetime of the IPv6 protocol. Even if we do, I doubt we will use more than 2 or 3 /12s ever.
Personally I believe the ARIN policy is the sane one. But we need to abide by the rules in the region we live in.
I agree with you, but as the author of the current ARIN ISP IPv6 policy, I may be biased. ;-) Owen