The deadline for new Policy Proposals to be discussed at APNIC 38 in Brisbane Australia next month closed on Friday, 8 August 2014.
The Open Policy Meeting during the Policy SIG sessions in Brisbane on 18 September, will consider a proposal to change IPv6 policy in such a way that it will enable new and existing IPv6 resource holders to request larger IPv6 address blocks.
The proposal was first submitted to the OPM in March this year. It did not reach consensus and was returned to the author and the mailing list for further consideration.
The author, Tomohrio Fujisaki, has now submitted a new version of the proposal, prop-111-v003: Request-based expansion of IPv6 default allocation size for the consideration of the Policy SIG.
Version three of the proposal is a response to concerns raised at the Petaling Jaya meeting, that some criteria should be required to justify a request for the expansion of an existing, or new, IPv6 allocation.
Previous versions of the proposal would have made it possible for LIRs to request an expansion from a /32 up to a /29 upon request (i.e. with no additional documentation and/or without meeting the utilization ratio of the previous allocation mandated by current IPv6 policy].
Following the discussion during the APNIC 37 Open Policy Meeting, the author has amended the proposal to require applicants to demonstrate need for the larger address block by providing information on how the address space will be used.
So far there has been relatively little reaction to the new proposal, which would allow existing IPv6 holders to expand into contiguous space left between allocations already made by APNIC.
Depending on an account holder’s existing IPv4 address space holdings, the increased Member Fees that would be incurred by expanding an allocation from /32 to /29, might have a dampening effect on any unnecessary requests that are not justified by immediate business or address planning requirements.
IPv6 space is not in tight supply conditions and so bringing forward requests that are not immediately justified would not make business sense. The fees associated with an IPv6 /29 are equal to the fees payable on an IPv4 /19, so small and very small resource holders would most likely see a fee increase as a result.
Prop-111 makes the argument that LIRs are more likely to announce a single prefix if they obtain a large enough space /29 at the beginning of their network roll-out compared than if they progressively grow from /32, to /31, to /30 as their network grows.
On the other hand, some community members may take issue with the policy on the grounds that it is in conflict with the principle of conservation, where a certain level of utilization of previous allocations needs to be shown before additional space can be requested.
Although existing IPv6 Policy lists conservation as a goal of IPv6 address space management it also acknowledges these goals will sometimes be in conflict. At section 3.8 Conflict of Goals the policy notes: “In IPv6 address policy, the goal of aggregation is considered to be the most important.”
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