Evening; Q: What now? A: At the APNIC meeing in New Delhi a proposal to remove the multihoming requirement for IPv6 portable assignments did not reach consensus. It's likely to come back again at the meeting in August and I'd like to explain a bit about it and get some feedback from the NZ community. Q: Ok what's this one all about? A; Right... Current APNIC policy only permits portable assignments of IPv6 addresses to be made if a member is currently multihomed or plans to be multihomed within three months. That can mean that people feel they can't apply for IPv6 space, or that they have to wait until they are multihomed in order to apply to APNIC for address space. Prop-101 looks to remove the requirement for multihoming and would let non-multihomed APNIC members apply for a portable IPv6 assignment. The full text is here: http://www.apnic.net/policy/proposals/prop-101/prop-101-v004.txt Q: What is a portable assignment and why would I want one anyway? A: A portable assignment of IPv6 addresses is independent of any particular ISP or network provider. It means that you can take those addresses and have them routed by anyone. Non-portable assignments are addresses which you might get from your ISP. Those addresses are taken from the ISPs block of IPv6 addresses and can only be used while you are their customer. If you were using non-portable addresses and wanted to move ISPs then you would have to renumber your network. Q: That sounds terrible! Why would anyone want anything else? A: Well for a lot of organisations they don't need anything else. Think about IPv4, most people operate with addresses given to them by their ISP just fine. Portable addresses are also only allocated by RIR organisations like APNIC. They don't come free, there is a yearly cost to be an APNIC member, and keep those addresses. Q: Are there any downsides? A: Objectors to this proposal suggest that if everyone was granted portable address space that the routing table would grow unnecessarily. Q: What does everyone else in the world do? A: APNIC is the only one for the 5 global registries which requires multihoming for portable IPv6 assignments. Q: So what do you want from me? A: If you have an opinion then let me know. If you think it's relevant to others then post it to the list. Don't hesitate to join the APNIC policy SIG list and have your say directly. Regards, Dean