Evening all, Q: Why are you interrupting my evening? A; I just wanted to let everyone know about a new APNIC policy which has just passed through the Policy Development Process Q: Huh? A: The APNIC Executive council has just ratified a new policy called prop-102 which will increase transparency in IPv6 allocations. Q: Well what does it say then? A: Well prop-102 is a hellish boring name a new APNIC proposal which says that details of any sparse allocation algorithm used for the allocation by APNIC of IPv6 resources be published on their the website, and any revisions should be communicated back to the community. You can read the full text here: http://www.apnic.net/policy/proposals/prop-102/prop-102-v003.txt Q: Why do I care? A: When people are allocated IP addresses, they are sometimes under the impression that if they request more at a later date that they will get allocated a completly different area of the address space. That's not true. For some time now APNIC has been employing a system called 'Sparse Allocation' to try and make sure that when you came back, you stood a good chance of getting the IP address block just next-door. The problem up until now has been no one knew the details of this system. How soon did you have to come back? How large was the block they were reserving for you? If you wanted too long did they allocate it to someone else? All those details were hidden. Now they will be published. Q: What are you telling me this? A: I'm doing my bit to keep the community across what is happening at APNIC in a way that hopefully people can find accessible. I'll summarise some of the other policies shortly Q: What if I have more questions? A: Feel free to email me and I'll try and answer any APNIC policy related questions. Or feel free to participate in APNIC discussion directly via their Policy SIG (http://www.apnic.net/community/participate/join-discussions/sigs/policy-sig) Regards, Dean