Re: ITU-T Dubai Meeting

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

Martin,

As far as the mass market goes, multiple prefixes and renumbering are a fact of life.
See the MIF and HOMENET WGs for more.

As far as enterprise networks go, renumbering is rather undesirable but sometimes
inevitable, see 6RENUM.

Regards
   Brian

On 07/08/2012 08:46, Martin Rex wrote:
> Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> [ Charset UTF-8 unsupported, converting... ]
>> On 06/08/2012 23:02, Martin Rex wrote:
>>> Steven Bellovin wrote:
>>>> Randy Bush wrote:
>>>>> whatever the number of address bits, if it is fixed, we always run out.
>>>>> memory addressing has been a cliff many times.  ip addressing.  ...
>>>> Yup.  To quote Fred Brooks on memory address space: "Every successful
>>>> computer architecture eventually runs out of address space" -- and I heard
>>>> him say that in 1973.
>>> I'm wondering what resource shortage would have happened if IPv6
>>> had been massively adopted 10 years earlier, and whether we would have
>>> seen the internet backbone routers suffer severely from the size
>>> of the routing tables, if every single home customer (DSL subscriber)
>>> would have required a provider-independent IPv6 network prefix rather
>>> than a single, provider-dependent IPv4 IP Address.
>> That was never a likely scenario (and still isn't). PA prefixes are still
>> the norm for mass-market IP, regardless of version number.
> 
> 
> IPv6 PA prefixes result in that awkward renumbering.
> Avoiding the renumbering implies provider independent
> network prefix.
> 
> With IPv4, you would have typically keept your IPv4 network address
> (the old class A, B & C from early 199x) even when changing network
> providers.
> 
> 
> To me, IPv6 PA prefixes look like a pretty useless feature
> (from the customer perspective).  Either you want an provider-independent
> prefix to avoid the renumbering when changing providers,
> or you want some level of privacy protection and therefore
> a fully dynamic temporary DHCP-assigned IPv6 address
> (same network prefix for 10000+ customers of the ISP)
> and for use with NAT (again to avoid the renumbering).
> 
> IPv6 renumbering creates huge complexity without value (for the customer).
> 
> -Martin
>