Residential subscribers: numbered or unnumbered?

Philip Matthews philip_matthews at magma.ca
Tue Mar 25 18:29:39 CET 2014


Folks:

Until recently, I was under the impression that most people were using numbered v6 links to residential subscribers, allocating the WAN address using DHCPv6.  However, recently two people have told me about a number of providers that are doing unnumbered instead.

So for anyone who has deployed or is planning to deploy residential IPv6, I am curious to know which way you are going, and more importantly why you selected that approach? My interest is primarily in IPoE, but I don't mind hearing about PPPoE as well.

The arguments I know or have heard for going numbered are:
* Have a WAN address that one can ping remotely to verify connectivity (here I am assuming using DHCPv6 to assign a specific IID like ::1)
* Want to use TR-069

The arguments I can think of for going unnumbered are:
* Greater security
* Plan to ping the loopback address on the CPE


Additional questions for those who have chosen the unnumbered approach or are using SLAAC to number the WAN address.
* What are you doing wrt having an address to ping to confirm the CPE is reachable?
* For those doing unnumbered, do all CPEs implement the same algorithm for selecting the loopback address according to WAA-7 in RFC 7084? If not, how do you handle this? For example, do you only select CPEs that implement the same algorithm? Do you just try the likely candidates until one works? Or something else?


- Philip


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