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Re: BBC does IPv6 ;) (Was: large multi-site enterprises and PIprefix [Re: who gets a /32)

  • From: Owen DeLong
  • Date: Thu Nov 25 12:43:27 2004


--On Thursday, November 25, 2004 10:27 AM +0100 Jeroen Massar <[email protected]> wrote:

On Thu, 2004-11-25 at 09:17 +0000, Martin Hepworth wrote:

The BBC has lots and lots of small regional (and sub-regional) offices
to provide local radio and TV, not to mention their larger operations
like TV center, broadcasting house, Pebble Mill and other production
studios for programs like EastEnders. 200 locations doesn't seem that
off to me..

That is exactly the right way to count ;)

Which kind of makes the point, that they deserve the /32 and any
organization that has at least quite a number of employees can thus get
one. If you are too small, then you are simply: too small.

Compare it too the following: Ask a telco for 10 million phone
numbers... a large company will actually use them, a small company won't
ever do that in it's lifetime. Of course, when you have grown larger one
can always get a large chunk, but then you really need it.
Which makes my point for me... From the Telco (or other number allocation
authority), a company can get numbers in 100 number blocks. If I wanted
to pay the fee, I could get 100 numbers for my house without having to
justify any sort of size or number of employees, etc. (For that matter,
if I were willing/able to pay for it, I could probably get 10 million numbers).

Yes, the RIRs should not be expected to hand /32s to every small business.
However, having the RIRs able to hand /48s or even /56s to every enterprise
is not unreasonable. There is nothing magic about /32. It is an arbitrary
prefix length chosen as the minimum allocation unit. I believe it needs to
be moved to the right, and, there need to be ways for organizations that
are not planning to provide IP services to other organizations to qualify.

Of course, I could counter this for the small business as well by saying that
during the lifetime of virtually any business, they will interact with at
least 200 other organizations. If I "plan" to do some of that interaction
by assigning each of them a small netblock from my space in order to
communicate with them, then, that is a "plan" that meets the test of the
current policy. Does anyone actually think this is a good idea?


Owen

--
If it wasn't crypto-signed, it probably didn't come from me.

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