Under this proposal all End Users in the RIPE NCC service region will receive an IPv6 PI assignment. All holders of IPv4 address space in the RIPE region will also be proactively informed that they have been assigned a block of IPv6 address space and that it is ready for deployment.
If a policy like this was ever to be accepted, it should only give every existing IPv4 *PI* holder, an IPv6 /48 block. There is no good reason to give non-PI holders in the RIPE database any IPv6 blocks. There is also no good reason to give any PI holder less than a /48 block as ARIN currently does. Longer prefixes in the routing table only make a confusing situation more confusing.
An assignment size of /56 is specified in the proposal in an effort to keep the routing table free from /64 address blocks. The /56 assignment is seen as a balance between individual routing requirements and routing aggregation needs.
I know of no research that shows any negative impacts of placing /64 blocks in a routing table. This is a silly argument since the proposal suggests *ADDING* a large number of routes to the routing table and there is a lot of published research about the problems caused by having too many routes in the routing table. In addition, this policy proposal is suggesting that RIPE should lie to all the End Users in the database and tell them that IPv6 is ready for deployment just because they now have some shiny new numbers in their RIPE database entry. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even though my company already has commercial IPv6 customers on our network, we would not know what to do with a flood of requests from people who think that IPv6 Internet access is easy if you have a number. IPv6 Internet access in Europe in early 2008 is hard. Lack of address assignments is not a barrier to making IPv6 Internet access work. The real barriers can be found by reading through some of the pages at <http://www.getipv6.info/> such as the one on First Steps for ISPs <http://www.getipv6.info/index.php/First_Steps_for_ISPs> or Transparent Internet Access <http://www.getipv6.info/index.php/Transparent_Internet_Access> Accepting a proposal like this would send entirely the wrong message and could only delay the deployment of IPv6 while we try to do damage control. --Michael Dillon