On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 11:49:27AM -0400, Thomas Narten wrote:
Jon Lawrence <jon@lawrence.org.uk> writes: It seems that folk have lost site of the motivation for this rule. What we were trying to achieve (and believe we still MUST strive to achive) is a balance between making it straightforward for a serious ISP to get an IPv6 block, but also prevent what is essentially an end site from getting an allocation direct from an RIR. The latter is not scalable long-term and must be prevented in general.
I know a lot of endsites, that (essentially) have (a) a lot more need for address space than many ISPs and (b) the realistic chance to deploy IPv6 in a large network, because they can actually force the use of IPv6 in their network. I think this fight for "Allocations of Address space only to ISPs" is one of the best reasons not to do IPv6. Actually the only reason for this rule that I can think of is, that it is made by ISPs who as it seems either believe they have the biggest networks or believe they could tie up customers with that. I think both assumptions are plain wrong. Currently it means no big organisation I can think of is willing to do IPv6. Now they are free to move from provider to provider, then they are not. Businesswise it would be stupid to give up this freedom.
The general goal is that any ISP that is seriously looking at deploying IPv6 and/or offering it to their customers should be able to get an allocation. But how do you "measure" the seriousness of this in
So an ISP with 200 Customers (each havong one server in his datacenter) gets IP-Space allocated, a multinational company having a few thousand servers and a few hundredthousand workstations all connected through their own network, doesn't. Okay, these are extremes, but extremes show it the best: This does not make sense. Maybe the rule should not say "planning to connect 200 organizations" but rather "will connect x devices within the next 2 years". X has to be negotiated. Or, instead of devices, networks. But these are much more useful numbers. As well for some ISPs (which only 5-20 customers, but these are big) as for other organizations, which in the end connect more end-users then most ISPs.
"other organizations" was intended to ensure that we don't get end sites saying "hey, I've got a global (internal) network, with 200 branch offices (each with a /48). I should qualify for an allocation".
I think these should qulify as much as an ISP connecting 200 Dialup-users. Nils -- *SAMMELT OBSTKERNE!*