Subject: RE: Limiting the Use of Site-Local

From: Dan Lanciani <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Nov 2002 20:32:56 -0500 (EST)

Margaret Wasserman <[email-masked]> wrote:

|What makes you think that you will "rent" individual addresses from
|your ISP in IPv6?

What makes you think that the current business model will change?  There
are two aspects of the current model.  ISPs charge per address because they
can use this as a surrogate measure of bandwidth, and they charge what the
market will bear because customers have no choice but to rent addresses.
Nothing in v6 changes either of these aspects.  In fact, some "features" of
v6 makes things worse for the customer here.  Functional site-locals might
have had a chance to at least constrain the price since an end user would be
paying only for the incremental feature of global access.  Without working
site-locals the basic functioning of each networked device will depend on
the ISP's address allocation and thus we will be back to whatever the market
will bear.  This in turn will encourage NAT.

|The idea is that every customer site should
|receive a /48 allocation,

That's a nice idea for the customer, but not such a nice idea for the ISP.
Given that the provider controls the allocation, what do you think will happen?

|and individual nodes (at the end of
|point-to-point links, etc.) should receive a /64.

Funny, it seems like only months ago someone was assuring me that dialups would
get a /48.  We've already lost 16 bits.  You have to realize that in practice
dialups will get a /128 unless they pay for special treatment.

|So far, the ISPs who have deployed IPv6 (there are only a few
|right now), have been allocating a /48 or a /64 to every customer.

Do you honestly think that this is a valid indication of anything?  V6 addresses
are virtually free at this time because they have virtually no commercial value.
V4 addresses were free in the good old days (yes, I was there) when they had
little perceived commercial value.  They were even provider-independent.  It
took some fancy footwork to get from that to where we are today, with each
market step sold as a temporary technical hack that (a) would require us to give
up nothing in the long term and (b) was vital to prevent the immediate collapse
of the net as we knew it.  Of course, all the address restrictions became
permanent even though their dubious technical justifications ceased to exist
long ago.  If and when v6 addresses gain commercial value their price will
increase as well.

				Dan Lanciani
				ddl@danlan.*com
--------------------------------------------------------------------
IETF IPng Working Group Mailing List
IPng Home Page:                      http://playground.sun.com/ipng
FTP archive:                      ftp://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng
Direct all administrative requests to [email-masked]
--------------------------------------------------------------------

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 05 Nov 2002 21:16:51 -0500

> You have to realize that in practice

mere speculation.