I would like to canvass the opinion of this list as to whether the
current multihoming requirement for portable IPv6 assignments is
truly necessary, or whether it could be removed from APNIC's IPv6
allocation policy.
That is, should IPv6 portable addresses be made available to anyone
upon request (with appropriate justifications and fees), without the
requirement to be multihomed?
At the moment, the only option for IPv6 addressing of a singly-homed
network is assignment from their ISP (as an LIR). This of course
should be fine for dynamically-assigned networks, or networks small
enough to renumber, but it will pose significant challenges for large
to very large statically-configured networks if they wish to change
ISP, since that implies by current practice and paradigms that the
customer will need to renumber their entire network to a new address
space assigned by the new ISP.
This issue can easily be removed, simply by making portable addresses
readily available to any company, and the only apparent policy change
required would be to remove the current multihoming requirement (i.e.
changing section 5.9.1 of the current "IPv6 address allocation and
assignment policy"). I believe that APNIC's standard fees and other
assignment criteria would naturally stop requests from any companies
other than those who really needed this for genuine business purposes
anyway (since who is going to pay AU$4,175 or more for a /48 if they
don't have to?), so I don't believe such a change would risk an
explosion of the routing table or an excessive consumption of IPv6 resources.
There otherwise does not seem to be any obvious value in retaining
the multihoming requirement; so while it may be likely that many
networks of that scale would be multihomed anyway, it does not seem
necessary to demand it - therefore I suggest it should be removed as
an unnecessary limitation, as in some circumstances it could hinder
or add complexity to the aim of general IPv6 deployment.
I'm eager to hear any thoughts about this idea from the members of
this list, and I would be interested in working with someone to
co-author a policy proposal.
David Woodgate
