> On Jul 15, 2015, at 03:43 , Baldur Norddahl <baldur.nordd...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On 15 July 2015 at 01:34, Owen DeLong <o...@delong.com> wrote: > >> For one thing a /32 is nowhere near enough for anything bigger than a >> modest ISP today. Many will need /28, /24, or even larger. The biggest ones >> probably need /16 or even /12 in some cases. >> > > What is the definition of a modest and a large ISP? > > In the RIPE region even the smallest ISP can get a /29 with no > documentation necessary. But likely that is all they will ever get because > policy requires that you use that /29 at about 30% efficiency if you do /48 > allocations to end users.
Which is fine… 30% of a /29 at /48 is 524,288 end-sites served. For a residential provider, I’d say that’s a medium-sized provider. A large provider would be one that serves several million end-sites. There are at least a handful of providers in the US for example, that have 10,000,000+ customers. A /29 wouldn’t be enough for them. RIPEs policy ignores the inefficiencies created by topology and that’s kind of unfortunate in my opinion, but so far it doesn’t appear too egregious, so I haven’t taken the time to propose better policy. > You would need more than a million users to get a /24. Sure. Many ISPs have more than a million end-sites (note end-sites != users). In many cases customer and end-site are synonymous, but in many cases, a single customer may have many end-sites. For example, a business which has several buildings in a campus may treat each building as an end-site. A multi-tenant building would likely treat each tenant as a separate end-site. etc. > I do not think the RIPE region has an ISP large enough to apply for a /16 > or anything near it. Perhaps. There are at least 2 ISPs in the US that I know of with 20,000,000+ customers. Since the NA in NANOG stands for North America, I kind of figured that the situation in North America ought to be considered somewhat relevant. > Therefore we can conclude that if ARIN manages to use up all the /3 address > space currently reserved for allocation, we will still be able to get > address space in Europe for the next thousands years :-). It is thought > that RIPE will not use up the /12 that IANA allocated to RIPE - ever. I doubt even with our current policy, ARIN is unlikely to use up the /12 in my lifetime or even in the lifetime of the IPv6 protocol. Even if we do, I doubt we will use more than 2 or 3 /12s ever. > Personally I believe the ARIN policy is the sane one. But we need to abide > by the rules in the region we live in. I agree with you, but as the author of the current ARIN ISP IPv6 policy, I may be biased. ;-) Owen
