Gents,

While I agree that autoconf is a major constraint and if I think selfishly about being liberal and competitive in the market, I shouldn't even care about assigning a larger subnet to residential CPEs.

But my perspective on this issue is without regards to businesses or ISPs or profits - its simply about whether we are wasting too many addresses for scenarios where, at the max, customers would probably never go beyond few thousand IPs ever. And whether we are likely to hit the same address exhaustion (as we face with IPv4 today) due to this liberal assignment.

And I seriously doubt that if we don't take the right decision about assignments to residential CPEs, it would be almost impossible to reclaim address spaces in future should we hit the exhaustion again.

We also know how at the start of IPv4, nobody could possibly imagine chewing up all 4 billion addresses and I fear some people are having the same mindset that having 2^64 amount of /64s out there are more than enough till the end of time :).

While its fine to assign a /64 to enterprises and corporate customers LANs, using the same technique in residential or high-volume single-user customer scenarios is gonna result in simple wastage of almost ~ 2^64 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 IPv6 addresses that could otherwise have been used where needed. I see this as a big waste of address space.

Autoconf of end-user addresses should not be considered as a driver for using /64s but a constraint that is making us take the decision of assigning /64 level subnets to end-users.

Anyway, if most of the community does not see from my perspective, I have no choice but to agree with majority's decision on this matter :) but I rest my case with everyone out there and have provided my 2 cents on this matter.


regards
Usman

From: Alastair Johnson <aj@sneep.net>
To: Randy Bush <randy@psg.com>; sig-policy-bounces@lists.apnic.net; Usman Latif <osmankh@yahoo.com>
Cc: APNIC Address Policy SIG <sig-policy@apnic.net>
Sent: Saturday, 17 September 2011 2:31 AM
Subject: Re: [sig-policy] Need to understand logic behind assigning /64IPv6 addresses

Indeed - I was going to make that point too.

*not* using /64s (or shorter) is going to make your helpdesk and customers unhappy... But as Randy says, your competitors will be happy.


-----Original Message-----
From: Randy Bush <randy@psg.com>
Sender: sig-policy-bounces@lists.apnic.net
Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2011 17:59:46
To: Usman Latif<osmankh@yahoo.com>
Cc: APNIC Address Policy SIG<sig-policy@apnic.net>
Subject: Re: [sig-policy] Need to understand logic behind assigning /64
    IPv6    addresses

i am fairly sure all your competitors would admire your parsimony and
cheer your issuing your customers only a /96.

randy
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