new IPv6 policy draft - real soon now

[Bob Fink]

Daniel,

At 06:21 PM 4/15/99 +0200, Daniel Karrenberg wrote:
...
>PS: I do not understand you presenting this as a hidden agenda.  It has
>been out in the open and I have explained this to you personally during
>the last IETF. 

Sorry to have given the impression that this is something I just found out
about. You have definitely explained it to me and others at the recent IAB
meeting, and I appreciate your taking the time to do that. Of course that
doesn't mean that there is agreement with the approach. 

It was also the case that, at the IAB discussion, you and/or other RIR folk
present felt that it might not be necssary to take this approach if we
could control the land rush for TLAs/sTLAs (by methods such as 6bone
prequalification and tough entry policies). Unfortunately this tack in the
conversation wasn't folowed up due to time constraints. I have been waiting
to see the next draft to see what the updated thinking of the RIRs is while
also pursuing the 6bone prequalification process.

However, I am concerned about this approach for more than the social policy
stuff. When one does aggregation the way v6 does, it needs reasonably sized
NLA space to provide a decent level of aggregatable hierarchy below the
sTLA level for multiple levels of lower tier providers and their end-sites
below them. With the /29 sTLA slow start, as specified in RFC 2450, there
are only 19 bits of NLA to play with... a tight but reasonable tradeoff if
one imagined a two- or three-level hierarchy (sTLA and one or two levels of
NLA transits below). With a /35 sTLA it gets real tight as only 13 bits are
left to play with.

To summarize, I don't think the RIRs have any hidden agenda here, and do
hope the RIRs don't use the /35 system and stay with the /29 the IETF
process proposed to them.


Thanks,

Bob