I’ve always been at odds with the recommendation in RFC 3177 towards allocating /48 IPv6 prefixes to end-sites. To me this seemed rather short-sighted, akin to saying that 640K of memory should be enough for anybody. It’s essentially equivalent to giving out /12s in the IPv4 world which in this day and age might seem completely ridiculous, but let us not forget that in the early days of IPv4 it wasn’t uncommon to get a /16 or even a /8 in some cases.
Granted, I know there are quite a few more usable bits in IPv6 than there are in IPv4, but allocating huge swaths of address space simply because it’s there and we haven’t thought of all the myriad ways it could be used in the future just seems outright wasteful. Continue reading “IETF Provides New Guidance on IPv6 End-Site Addressing”