However, our focus is on medium-size and large customers, which are quite unlike residential end-user customers where 200 would be next to nothing. I doubt we'll have 200 such customers (without creative accounting, that is) in a while yet, but we are still doing active business. The current rule effectively prevents us from deploying IPv6 to our customers.
I think that the current rule puts RIPE in violation of the EU guidelines on horizontal cooperation agreements. http://europa.eu.int/scadplus/leg/en/lvb/l26062.htm In particular, I believe that it is an unfair limitation of ouput. Of course, I am not a lawyer, but nevertheless, the 200 limitation seems rather dodgy and artificial. I realize that RIPE serves more than just the EU but I think that even in Russia, central Asia and the middle East, there are similar competition laws. As policymakers, we have to be concerned with the legal environment around us, and therefore this limit must be removed. From an engineering viewpoint there is no clear justification for this limit. In all the discussion to date the only thing that seems to have solid engineering justification is that IPv6 /32 addresses cannot be handed out to everyone who wants one. There must be some technical justification for the request, such as the plan to run an IPv6 network that internetworks at least two IPv6 networks. In most cases these two or more networks can be distinguished by being physically disjoint, i.e. two separate buildings or cities. But Internet exchanges and large hosting facilities are in a single location but they are clearly internetworks from the engineering point of view. So if we want a policy that includes a limitation based on real engineering, how do we word it? And how do we ensure that the terms we use are clearly defined. In the past, many such policies have use very ill-defined and vague terminology that often conflicts with the normal English usage of words. Is there a way to define an IPv6 internetwork so that the policy gives clear guidance to RIPE hostmasters but does not fall afoul of EU competition rules?
While routing table growth is a concern, not having (v6) routing table growth is in my opinion an even larger concern. Therefore my view is that the arbitrary fixed criterion of having to be "large" (for whatever value of large) for a v6 allocation should be dispensed with.
I really think that the original makers of the policy were not trying to define "large" but were trying to find a way to define an internetwork as distinct from an end site. If we look at the IPv6 Internet as a hierarchy with large high-bandwidth international networks near the root and individual offices at the leaves, then we can see that leaves have a single connection but all other nodes in the hierarchy have two or three or more connections. All the non-leaf nodes are internetworks. The natural processes of corporate growth and consolidation will limit the number of non-leaf nodes in this hierarchy so that it will form some type of flat pyramid. These same mechanisms limit the growth of the global routing table and therefore I feel confident that giving out a /32 to any internetwork with plans to deploy IPv6 will not create a routing table crisis. It would be nice if RIPE could find some university to do a study of the network economy to understand this hierarchy better and give us the information to predict the future number of nodes in the hierarchy. I will note that Merit in the USA recently got a graduate student to do an analysis of questionnaires from several years of NANOG meetings. It's not network engineering but this kind of research is still very useful to policymakers. --Michael Dillon