Re: proposal for RIPE's IPv6-address space structure

[Daniel Karrenberg <]

  > JOIN Project Team join@localhost writes:
  > Does this imply that one geographical region may be covered by more
  > than one regional registry? In this case 5 bit Reg IR ID would not be
  > really 'plenty'.

No. It means that the regions covered by regional registries cannot be
predicted. 

  > 
  > > Maybe Northern Africa will be a different region from
  > > Southern Africa again different from the Middle East.  Maybe they will
  > > all be one region.  It is by no means clear.  As grouping picked today
  > > not may make sense once this process starts and worse it may be
  > > counterproductive.
  > 
  > Why?

Because wars have started over less than a bit field assignment. 
Setting unnecessary precedences is never a good idea, it is certainly
a very bad idea if it is done without consensus of those affected.
So do not do it. The establishment of regional registries will 
be driven by need, willingness and ability of groups of ISPs to
achieve consensus. This depends on many factors is not predictable. 
So let's not second guess it.

  > > I propose to use region IDs per regional registry.  Once a new regional
  > > registry starts it gets a new region ID. 
  > 
  > Section 3.2 in ID [1] says that a Regional Registry may have more than one
  > block of addresses allocated to it.

Yes, so what?

  > I don't think that there is anything wrong with your proposal. But
  > for really estimating it, it is not concrete enough. It would be helpful
  > to start the 'further discussion' on detailed policies such as 
  > ranges for r.

I have not thought about that really.  Quite frankly there is a lot of
missing information before one can get that concrete.  The most
important piece missing is information on interdomain (exterior) routing
schemes to be used.  That's why I pointed out Mike O'Dell's 8+8 draft. 
Before routing becomes more clear any address allocation/assignment
scheme needs to be very conservative in order not to preclude too many
options in the high order bits.  It also has to have the label
"preliminary, provisional" because it may otherwise become useless.  
In the light of this and the fact tht we are not exactly overwhelmed by
ISPs asking for IPv6 address space I doubt whether we need to discuss
concrete schemes at this point.  However we should keep this item on the
agenda and have a discussion at the January RIPE meeting.  We should
also watch developments at the upcoming IETF. 

Daniel