6bone Prequalification for Sub-TLA assignment

[Nathan Lane]

A perspective from a Fortune 5 company with a large IP deployment:

I'm currently in the throes of whether or not to obtain a huge allocation of
ipv4 addresses at great cost (I already have 28 /16s [enough left for about a
year given no surprises] and a usage of about a million or two 1918 private
addresses) for a project that will take years to implement.  If I can go in and
say "we go ipv6, with a no/low cost address allocation big enough for our now
and future needs" I'll get support for that when faced with a $2.5mil ARIN
bill.  NATing 3600 sites for bidirectional connectivity to outside sources is
obviously a virtually impossible task - it's almost easier to throw in v6 with
policy routing and tunnels at endpoints once you start thinking about the
magnitude.

So, I'm in a bind and not in the namespace sense.  I would encourage liberalism
as well to encourage deployment.  It will strongly encourage v6 deployment in my
network and my enterprise is large enough to force vendor compliance.

We all need to keep in mind the business side.  My IP renumbering project, into
1918 addresses, has been a two year "hold it, you know what you're getting us
into?  NATmare."  But the protocol value alone of v6 will not convince me to go
to it.  Economics will.  Availability of released code also will help and
certain vendors are not exactly forthcoming nor helpful.

-Nathan Lane
Senior Network Engineer
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.


"Perry E. Metzger" wrote:

> Bob Fink <fink@es.net> writes:
> > If Sub-TLAs are given away too easily, they will be encouraging non-ipv6
> > providers to get theirs now, i.e., the land rush model which could easily
> > fill up the TLA/Sub-TLA space with networks, sites, and organizations that
> > simply want to make sure they have a TLA/Sub-TLA, even if they don't need
> > one now or really qualify (i.e., they have no intent on putting up IPv6
> > service and/or are simply not higher level transits).
> >
> > Alternatively, if Sub-TLAs are too hard to get, especially in the early
> > days of IPv6 deployment, it will discourage providers from putting up IPv6
> > service, may give the impression that IPv6 doesn't help the address space
> > problem at all, thus greatly impeding the progress of IPv6 deployment and
> > transition, and even pose a legal risk to the registries.
>
> I think we should err on the side of liberalism. The whole advantage
> of IPv6 is that we don't break the IP end to end model by forcing
> people into NATs. If its too hard to get v6 address space, no one is
> going to have any incentive to move to v6. If you can get v6 space
> when you couldn't get v4 space, people will start wanting it.
>
> Perry