Current Consensus on IPv6 Customer Allocation Size

[Marco Hogewoning]

> I have read through multiple threads regarding this issue (though most of them are years old), and know it may be a can of worms, but I need some insight into what people are actually doing in 2012. ARIN "suggests" a /48 for all customers or sites as far as I can tell, though apparently in the past they also had language including /56 assignments in some docs.  I'm trying to come up with a reasonable numbering plan that can accommodate /48 customer assignments from our /32.

The RIPE Database contains a bit of a hint on what people do in an attribute called "assignment-size". A quick, not very sophisticated, unix one liner on last night's dump gives the following distribution:

149		assignment-size: 48
10 		assignment-size: 49
3		assignment-size: 52
2		assignment-size: 54
463 	assignment-size: 56
13		assignment-size: 60
171		assignment-size: 64

Mind you, these are only a subset of the total amount of IPv6 assignments. The attribute is only mandatory when using the "AGGREGATED-BY-LIR" status to group large numbers of smaller assignments in one database object. Fair chance these are mostly broadband pools (or tunnels), but can't say for sure without going over all the descriptions.

Anyways, it looks like /56 is pretty popular followed by an almost even number of /48 and /64 assignments.

If there is interest, I can have a chat internally to see if we can come up with some more and better analysis of the numbers, possibly a nice topic for RIPE 65.

Marco
(full disclosure: RIPE NCC employee, co-chair of the RIPE IPv6 WG and "inventor" of the assignment-size attribute)