On Fri, 14 Nov 2008, michael.dillon@bt.com wrote:
Not long ago, ARIN changed the IPv6 policy so that residential subscribers could be issued with a /56 instead of the normal /48 assignment. This was done so that ISPs with large numbers of subscriber sites would not exhaust their /32 (or larger) allocations too soon. Since these ISPs are allowed to assign a /56 to residential subscriber sites, their initial IPv6 allocation will last a lot longer and they won't have to apply for an additional allocation while everyone is getting up to speed with an IPv6 Internet.
We returned our /32 for a /25 (with /22 being reserved) and current plan is to hand out /48s to everybody (unless they need even more space, then they'll have to apply). So, doing /56 to end users just because you happen to have a /32 right now sounds like a bad plan, it doesn't take that many hours to get a larger space if you can justify it (which wasn't that hard for us). We received our /32 (as a /35 I think) back in 2000 or so, policy has changed since then, with RIPE it's not that hard to get a much larger space with a long term growth plan. My hope is that we'll make do with this /22 space for at least 5-10 years (67 million customer /48s is quite a lot), unless something really big happens, and then we'll just have to get an even larger space. So message should be that /48 to end users is the way to go, and this should suit residential and SME market without any additional administrative overhead depending on customer size. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se