Summary

  • ARIN-2025-7 would state that two to 12 justified sites will receive a /44 initial IPv6 allocation. At ARIN 58 on 22 October, ARIN staff said an applicant could take less, and a participant identified the mismatch between eligibility and mandatory delivery.
  • The meeting poll recorded 67 in support and two opposed to the proposal as written. The draft remains under discussion. Neither that show of hands nor staff's spoken assurance supplies a written rule for choosing a smaller block.

Imagine an operator with eight sites preparing an initial IPv6 application. It has enough documented locations to enter the draft's two-to-12 band. The bullet point offers no menu: it says the organization will receive a /44. If the operator's design calls for less, the policy text does not say how to ask for it or who may approve that choice.

That question was put directly to ARIN at its Miami public policy meeting. Lee Howard asked whether eight sites mean an applicant will receive a /44 or may receive one. He raised the possibility of someone preferring a smaller allocation for billing reasons. John Sweeting, ARIN's Chief Experience Officer, answered that there is flexibility. Adair Thaxton then pointed to the exact textual fault: the draft says an organization “will qualify for” the next size, while its examples say it “will receive” that size. The first verb gives an entitlement; the second sounds like an instruction to the registry.

The draft arrived at this fork by solving a different problem. Today's NRPM §6.5.8.2 starts with an initial /48 and applies a 75% formula for the next nibble boundary. For a single-site organization, the formula and the example do not sit cleanly together. ARIN-2025-7 makes the one-site /48 explicit and starts the larger bands at two sites. It also replaces obsolete “assignment” wording with “allocation.” ARIN staff call the change a clarification of existing practice with no operational impact. Yet the proposed bands still use will receive: /44 for two to 12 sites, /40 for 13 to 192, /36 for 193 to 3,072, and /32 above that through 49,152 sites.

Howard's fee example needs a price check. ARIN's current 2026 fee table puts both a standalone /48 and /44 inside the same IPv6 aggregate band, /40 or smaller; a temporary waiver extends that band to /36 through year-end. The microphone exchange does not prove that choosing between those two blocks changes today's bill. It does prove that the size of the recorded allocation is a decision the applicant may care about. A spoken assurance is a fragile place to store that decision rule.

The meeting's show of hands gave the draft substantial support: ARIN reported 67 for and two against, with 115 people in the room and 78 remote participants. It was a poll on the proposal as written, not Board adoption. The same meeting record contains the unresolved choice question. The proposal page still marks ARIN-2025-7 under discussion and the draft's examples still say will receive.

The missing fact is a published instruction saying whether a qualified applicant may request less than the tabulated size and how ARIN records the election. If the answer is yes, one sentence in the policy or accompanying application guidance would turn the staff's answer into an applicant's usable right.

Sources