[ipv6-wg] Why /48? (was IPv6 residential service: What prefix, static, dynamic, extra cost ?)

...another flash-back to the previous millennium below.

On 2016-05-19 10:18, Shane Kerr wrote:
> Jen and all,
> 
> Gather 'round kids, Grandpa has a story!

So this from a Grand-Grand-Pa :-)

> At 2016-05-18 20:56:13 +0200
> Jen Linkova <furry13 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 8:45 PM, JORDI PALET MARTINEZ
[...]
> I was at a meeting way back in the 20th century - either my first or
> second time at an IETF, IIRC.

And I remember a late-night meeting amongst the RIR Folks (in Bangkok, iirc),
when we tried to come up with a distribution policy which would be a compromise
between the different points of view in the 5 regions.

It turned out that we were successful in the end.

One of the arguments in favour of a uniform prefix length (/48 per 'site')
was the support for easy renumbering support in DNS. Anyone remembers the
A6 RR type and the level of abstraction/indirection it would have offered?
Alas, this beast is extinct by now. RIP...

> There was a discussion amongst RIR-types
> about the default prefix size. Someone proposed the /48 and said that
> we need to have the same size for every assignment, so that it is easy
> for customers to move between providers, and to avoid establishing the
> difference between 'residential customer' and other customers that you
> are describing. Even at the time I thought it was a bit cheeky to be
> establishing policy like this, but the idea was not criticized at the
> meeting. (I also suggested that we don't really need to use 8-bit
> boundaries even, but was told via some hand-waving arguments about
> ASICs that this was absolutely necessary.)

I, too, think that this was mostly hand-waving. The only boundary I do
consider essential is alignment with the 4bit hex digits of the external
representation, in order to have aligned reverse DNS delegation points.

FWIW,
Wilfried

> ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> --
> Shane
> 

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