From the operator perspective, the demand is for address space that is
architecturally set aside as private use, locally controlled. That did not
initially exist in IPv4, and history shows that people took whatever bit
patterns looked interesting.
You must talk with different operators than the ones I talk with.
I have heard operators wanting address space for the following:
- Private networks which are never routed to the Internet (management and various things like GPRS things), but possibly routed to peers, i.e. there might be the need for local routing
This can be done by using real addresses which are never routed to the Internet. This is something which is possible to do in IPv6 but not IPv4 due to RIR policies. So, today, the ISP's use RFC 1918 addresses, but of course peering then end up being a problem. Because of this, we see telcos using 11/8 and such IPv4 space for gprs.
In IPv6 world, real addresses can and should be used.
- Private networks which they nat customers behind so the customers can not so easy set up their own servers
This is a packet filter/security issue and not a NAT issue. The selection of NAT is a bad thing, and this is exactly what we should prohibit in IPv6 world. Yes, the ISP can still sell filtered access of various kinds and possibly a large portion of the users out there want it. But, it should not be part of the architecture.
- Private networks for certain services which is located close to the customers so the same IP address is reused at every pop
The ISP can in IPv6 world take a portion of their (real) address space and do the same thing. That ISP's today use RFC 1918 addresses means the RFC 1918 addresses are (for the customer) not used as intended, but as real addresses. In IPv6 world this is not needed.
- Tons of addresses so they can redesign their internal network a lot without risking renumbering
With IPv6 they get many many more addresses than before, so they don't have to allocate /29 here and there in IPv4 for small networks which should only have a few hosts. They can have the same netmask all over the place. And still limit the size of their broadcast domains.
paf
-------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPng Working Group Mailing List IPng Home Page: http://playground.sun.com/ipng FTP archive: ftp://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng Direct all administrative requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------
