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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical RE: 16 vs 32 bit ASNs [Re: BBC does IPv6 ;) (Was: large multi-siteenterprises and PI]
--On Tuesday, November 30, 2004 7:44 AM +0200 Pekka Savola <[email protected]> wrote: On Mon, 29 Nov 2004, Chris Burton wrote:It is highly doubtful that the policies in place will become more relaxed with the introduction of 32-bit ASNs, the more likely scenario is that they will stay the same or get far stricter as with assignments of IPv4 or IPv6 addresses.I find this hard to believe. When there is 64K times as much the resource, there is no way the policies would get stricter, because it can easily and logically be argued that they don't need to be stricter. Reality denies your statement. Currently, one could at least argue, that IPv6 policies are significantly stricter than IPv4 policies. The ratio between IPv6 addresses and IPv4 addresses is much much more than 64K times as much. As such, your argument falls very flat very early just based on current experience. As you had mentioned though, in the near term this definitely would not be scalable, but who knows what is going to happen 10, 15, or more years from now.So, let's delay the move until we know how to make it more scalable. Let's not. The reality is that going to 32bit ASNs isn't because we want to assign 4 billion ASNs tomorrow. It's because we realize that in a few years, there will be a need for more than 64K ASNs and 32 bits is the next easy-to-code boundary. Given that in general practice, somewhere around 0.6 of assigned ASNs are actually visible in the global routing table, I don't think the sky will fall simply because 32 bit ASNs are available. The same controls will still be in place at the RIRs unless some deliberate action is made with consensus of the RIR constituency to change them. I think your numbers may be a little off 2^32 = 4,294,967,296; current world population give or take a few million is hovering around 6,300,000,000 according to the US Gov. If everyone and the mother would like an ASN (Which is highly unlikely) you would need just a few more to make that work.Yeah, I know the calculations :). Everyone can already get an IPv4 address too, right? All we need is an AS number NAT.. oops, it's there already. Face it, with 32 bit ASNs, pretty much anyone could have an ASN if they wanted to unless the policies were very strict, and it would be very difficult to justify why it would have to be strict because there is so vast resource to be used. It needs to be strict because, as you have pointed out, the assignment of an ASN has potential consequences beyond simply ASN exhaustion. The current ASN policies are not there primarily to keep from running out of ASNs. The general attitude towards this from the RIRs has been "32 bit ASNs are coming soon anyway, so, ASN exhaustion is not the issue". Owen -- If it wasn't crypto-signed, it probably didn't come from me. Attachment:
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