Telecom and IPv6

optimumtact: Thanks everyone for the replies. It's interesting to see the differing viewpoints on the dates for when Telecom needs to move to IPv6. I am just wondering as we are seeing a number of major ISP's in America (Comcast being the first that springs to mind) beginning to think about/shift to an IPv6 Solution. Wouldn't do for us to get left behind.

Of course you can get IPv6 via teredo now on windows machines and I have been visiting some sites in IPV6 and it is quite slow due too the encapsulation, native IPv6 support from telecom would be nice :) .

edit: On that note, how many IP's will they allocate per account? There has been some talk on other forums about this and they seem to agree that there will be a fair number of IP addresses assigned to each account with the ISP (Just because there are so many addresses and it's easier on the ISP's routing tables.)

To answer your question, realistically, who knows what size publicly routable prefix the ISPs will assign to their customers? I don't think anyone but the ISPs do to be honest.

Personally? I doubt they are going to be wasteful like HE.net and throw /48's to anyone that wants them, but I hope NZ ISPs don't just say a /64 will be enough. I'm hoping that ISPs will do say a /60 (that allows ~16 /64 local subnets which should be more than enough for even the most complex home networks ;) without been wasteful).

Basically, /64 is the smallest subnet you can get that supports the Router Advertisement (RA) auto addressing (which personally I prefer over the idea of using DHCPv6 for a home network), although that may not be ideal as it seems sending DNS over RA replies is not really standardised, and while a /62 may be better sized, complexities over addressing arise, /60 seems to be a decent size + allows identification of networks.

But really it comes down to how they do it from an infrastructure point of view though. Just my 'wishlist' defines a /60 instead as a reasonable size (i.e.: 2001:0DB8:AAAA:AAAX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX , the first part is the initial /32 assigned to the ISP/Telecom, the A's are determined by the ISP to create a unique /60 for each customer (which would create about 268 million /60's) , and the X's are the hexadecimal bits (from the /60) that I can play with.)

Beccara

nigelj