Hacker News Reader

Comment by ninkendo | Hacker News Reader

Thinking aloud: there needs to be a rethinking of how prefixes work in the next ::/3 we allocate for global unicast: it should be possible for individuals to get their own /48 for basically the same price as a domain name today. Hell, they could make cash as people rush to buy the memorable ones. Make personal route announcement a basic part of ISP service as defined by the FCC. We’d have a fighting chance of actually having a decentralized internet again. But I’m basically wishing for a pony at this point.

View on HN

It’s not actually expensive or difficult for an individual to get an ASN and IPv6 space.

https://lagrange.cloud/products/lir £15 one-off for an ASN and £7/y for a /48.

Then you just need to find someone to give you a BGP session. https://bgp.services

I can't get any of that to my house. Comcast doesn't support BGP advertising a custom /48, and I can't even get one in the first place unless I'm dual-homed. The product you linked to has no details but it seems like you can get a /48 for their services, ie. if they're hosting my machines, they'll give me a /48. That doesn't help me.

It helps you if you set up a tunnel back to your location. I have a /48 tunneled back to my home network over wireguard. There are several RIPE LIRs that will guide you through this, even if you're in the US. (You'll need a VPS in the EU to satisfy the contractual requirements. Your other VPSes can be closer to you.)

That 7£ /48 is a PA assignment, you can't take it home with you. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provider-aggregatable_addres...

You can. I have some PA address space, assigned by an LIR, that I announce out of my own AS. All "PA" means is it comes out of their parent block and, if you stop paying, they'll probably want it back.

Exactly. I have a PA /32 of IPv6 that I can sub-allocate and announce however I want. Or even lease to other people. It's my space, as long as I'm paying my LIR for it.

You can do whatever you want with that PA assignment. PA means that it's the provider's address space, not yours. You can announce it wherever you want though.

The Wikipedia explanation is flat-out wrong.

How would announcing it elsewhere help with the "Aggregatable" part? Are people accepting advertisements for small PA subnets?

Yes. A /48 of v6 is perfectly announcable.

There is no functional difference between PA and PI.

You can basically do this today. There are RIPE LIRs that will allocate you a /48 pretty cheaply. There are tunneling services that will route it to you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com