I'm not sure we need to debate the subnet vs. bridging question. Of course bridging will go a long way; yet I don't think anyone on this thread wants to claim that we should limit home networks to it. The crux of the issue is the unpredictability of what will happen with technology, a particular type of a site, and a specific user. We give an allocation to someone right now, what will happen in five years? How big has his network grown, and what technology does it use? If we guessed wrong and gave the user too small prefix, there will be pain -- new requests for space to the ISP, restricted growth of the user's network, renumbering, multiple routing entries instead of one, etc. If we guess wrong the other way and give the user too much, this either does not matter at all, or we waste addresses, depending on whether the allocations cause actual address shortage. It is obvious that allocations need to be tailored to the need -- I don't want DSL users assigned as many addresses as providers or multi-national corporations get. But the question is at what granularity are we doing this, and at what point do we stop caring about the details? Personally, I think the 48 bit boundary works pretty well and I do not see a real-life reason to worry about address shortage. Having said that, something slightly more fine grained would work too, e.g., 48 or 56, or what Iljitsch proposed. Tuning the policy every few bits seems unnecessary, IMHO. A couple of relevant IETF links: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3177 http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-narten-ipv6-3177bis-48boundary-02.txt (currently in state Dead) Finally, I hope this thread does not stay only within the IETF list and that some of you actually voice your opinions in the ARIN process. (But as Tony noted, ARIN just makes policy with respect to how it hands out addresses -- its the actual providers that sell the service to customers. Neither the IETF or ARIN have direct control of this, though of course we like to encourage ease of address allocation.) Jari _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf