[address-policy-wg] IXP pool lower boundary of assignments

On 8 Nov 2022, at 11:52, Tore Anderson wrote:

> While I do hope you will be proven to be right about that, I am not so
> optimistic. The industry's track record on being able to migrate away
> from IPv4 to IPv6 before the exhaustion of the former is not great, to
> put it mildly.

I am not sure that IXPs have actually tried to migrate away from IPv4.
My working assumption has always been that members demand IPv4 addresses to peer with and this requirement would remain whilst we still have an IPv4 Internet. At present if you are a new IXP entrant it will be harder to attract members if you do things in an unusual fashion such as this. It would require change from the very largest operators.

If we think router vendors are in a position to reliably support v4 AF over BGP in v6, and actually route this traffic, we should definitely look at it! I welcome thoughts on that (which will inevitably be out-of-scope for a-p-wg). The IXPs would also need to invest in some tooling and testing (e.g. route-server policy changes).

> That even goes for the IXP pool specifically:
> In 2011, we thought a /16 with a default assignment size of /24 would
> suffice to «safeguarding future IXPs with IPv4 space».
[…]

I think this is more due to growth: decentralisation of interconnection away from the big IXs and closer to end-users, which is to be distinguished from growth of existing IXes.


On the issue of assignment size, it does seem we can’t go on with assigning more /24s as the minimum. Not sure if there’s a land-grab going on but just today alone another four /24s were handed out to an operator for use in the Nordic region - with two /24s for Norway alone, a country whose largest IX at present contains under sixty AS. That seems wasteful.

However I do agree with others that handing out subnets as small as /29s would seem to punish success at an early stage. I think Marcus has already covered that topic well.

(Earlier, Tore wrote:)
> By the way, last I checked there were a number of unassigned fragments
> smaller than /24 rotting away in the NCC's inventory, due to there
> being no policy that allowed for their assignment. IX-es are one of the
> very few places where those can be used, so they could be all added to
> the reserved IXP pool and actually do some good there.

How much of this ‘space dust’ is available? (i.e is it worth the effort?)


-- 
Will Hargrave
Technical Director
LONAP Ltd