Hi, > I understand you feel the IPv6 addressing architecture of a few ISPs you are > dealing with is so poor that you cannot stand by silently. I'll assume you > have made attempts to meaningfully (and without emotion) exchange ideas with > them. You've now come to this list to paint them with a broad brush. So > in this case, I think you should name names. What are the names of the ISPs > you are dealing with who are managing their IPv6 product so poorly that you > think ALL of RIPE's providers should be subject to more regulation from the > NCC? By naming them, perhaps representatives here will see your plea, and > perhaps members of the Address Policy WG can intercede on your behalf or have > engineer-to-engineer discussions with them.
Well ... for one, if it had been one or two providers, I probably wouldn't have felt the need to do anything about it, there always are some bad products on the market, and the best way to deal with them is to simply not buy them. It seems to me like this is a systemic problem, given how many providers seem to be affected by it. Now, no, I didn't try to "exchange ideas" with all of them, that would simply have been too much work, but I did with quite a few, and my impressions come from what they said plus the content of the offers (or non-offers) from the others. Also, maybe I should stress that when I wrote that many providers seem "incompetent" or "psychologically incapable", that is not meant as an insult, but as a rather neutral description of the problem: They don't understand the tradeoffs in address allocation, but instead only react on an emotional level to the idea of assigning "so many addresses!", or at least that is my interpretation of the behaviour I observed--while RIPE documents seem to assume that people try to rationally understand address allocation/assignment. However, I do not necessarily think that more regulation is the way to go (really, IMO that should be the last resort if nothing else helps), and if more regulation is the way to go, I guess it should be put together in such a way that the impact on competent providers is as close to zero as possible ... Things are further complicated by the fact that many of the providers probably aren't RIPE members themselves (I don't really know, not all RIPE members do advertise it prominently ...). > Even now in late 2015, I believe IPv6 is still very greenfield. Network > operators are still figuring out how to best do things; how to best architect > IPv6 offerings in a way that balances their needs with their customers' > needs. More regulation from the NCC is, in my opinion, many years premature. > Well ... I am not sure whether that is funny or just sad, given that I've had native IPv6 connectivity for the last 10 years, with a /48 prefix, from a competent provider (yes, they do exist, obviously!), which now needs replacement (for reasons unrelated to the provider or their competence). Regards, Florian
