[RRG] End user network size [ [Q] draft-farinacci-lisp: IPv4 address depletion]

[Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@gmail.com>]

On 2007-09-26 13:41, Robin Whittle wrote:
...
> My idea is that there are many end-user networks which need less
> than 256 IP addresses and whose owners need or strongly desire their
> networks to be multihomed and/or to be free to move to another ISP
> without renumbering.  

I feel I have to pick this apart to explain why I disagree.

I don't think the owners of such small networks care about
their IP address at all. Their true requirements are

- they want their network to be highly reliable
- they want to be free to move to another ISP without manual intervention

I doubt if many of them are willing to pay a second ISP fee to
obtain reliability; so it's actually their current ISP who has
to provide the reliability, which may well include multihoming
the ISP, but that's at another scale.

I'm sure none of them want to know anything about IP addresses.
Maybe they do need invariant addresses for their printers etc.,
but RFC 1918 or IPv6 ULAs will do just fine for that, and have
nothing to do with their ISP prefix. Whoever installs their
network can set up local addresses for printers. When they
change ISPs, DHCP (or RAs) will invisibly update addresses
for all their systems needing Internet access. It's no different
from when they power cycle their ADSL box today. From my
experience, that's something that typical small offices get
to do every couple of weeks anyway. They don't even notice
that the desktops may get new addresses.

I'm sticking to my analysis that SOHO sized networks are
simply not impacted by the R&A problem. I believe we only
need to worry about significantly larger units, of at
least 1000 hosts, and that sets a less ambitious target.

    Brian

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