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Free IPv6 Subnets Are Going Away
ar32h writes "The 6bone is going to be phased out soon.
This means all of us who have IP addresses or subnets beginning with 3ffe from tunnel brokers like Freenet6 are going to be sorry out of luck." According to the linked phaseout plan, "It is anticipated that under this phaseout plan the 6bone will cease to operate by July 1, 2006, with all 6bone prefixes fully reclaimed by the IANA," but there are a number of sub-deadlines along the way.
ARIN is the reason there are no more IP addresses. Their polices don't allow small compaines any way to dual home and their stupidity results in lots of compaines getting far more addresses than they need. Did you need more than a /24? I know you got more because they can't dish out any less than /22 or so now.
I think that ARIN should start a policy that for any new allocation, 1/16 must be dual homeable. These addresses would be dual allocated to two ISPs at the same time and that any large ISP that needs more address space must set up agreements with other ISPs. This would force them to change from the model they use now to one with more cooperation.
Right now I need 16 address that can be routed via either NTT or Telstra but to get 16 with ARINs model, I have to pay then too much and then they give me far more addresses that I will ever use.
I've used Freenet6 and Hurricane Electric's tunnels; I must say that he.net's tunnels have had much lower latency [and have been much more reliable] than Freenet6's. That said, Freenet6 was incredibly straight-forward for a lot of users (Debian even does all the bally-hoo for you after your register, but it's nothing a simple self-made script won't accomplish) and certainly should be lauded for their simplicity.
If you happen to have at one IPv4 address, you are automatically allocated a /48 subnet on IPv6 with 6to4. For free. Good luck trying to run out of addresses (for the non-initiated, a /48 contains 2^80 addresses).
This article is unnecessarily alarming, but then again, who would bother reading an article with this headline: "6bone users have to change addresses in three years"?.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
A /32 net is a really big chunk that is intended for providers, not users. You should get a /48 from your provider without problems, which leaves you with 2^16 local subnets and 2^64 hosts per subnet.