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Comment by Y_Y | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible for me, or worse, a normal person, to claim or request an ipv6 address that they can keep and use like a phone number? I'm used to dynamic allocation for residential ipv4 addresses and never bothered to beg ARIN for some or rent since from an ISP. Having an address you could keep and bring with you would be great and avoid a lot of the difficulties of DNS.

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Hurricane Electric gives out free ipv6 blocks that you can assign however you want.

I get an ipv6 for my phone through Wireguard that way.

Theoretically possible? Yes: https://chown.me/blog/getting-my-own-asn

A good idea? No.

IP addresses are used for routing. Every provider-independent block of addresses needs its own entry in the global routing tables, which are stored on basically every BGP router in the world. There's a limit to the size of these tables, as they need to be stored in special TCAM memory.

Note that IPv4 currently has many more routes than IPv6 not only due to higher adoption, but also due to higher fragmentation: some providers are obtaining many small non-consecutive blocks from different sources (buying addresses wherever they are cheapest), which results in a large number of routing entries. The increase in the overall table size means all other ISPs have to buy new hardware sooner than they would have without the increase caused by fragmentation. Everyone having their own personal address block would cause even worse fragmentation issues.

An IP is not a global phone number. You cannot port the same "number" from one carrier to another.

If we want that, global orgs in charge of the global phone number mapping must coordinate around some slice of the IPv6 address space (what they already do with international roaming of phone numbers). This will be very hard to operate safely, very probably.

There remain the trappings of what was designed to be static IPv6 addresses that would dynamically route to the network that device was - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_IP

I don't know if it's actually being used. IIRC since then everything has moved to a higher layer.

I cannot tell neither how things would work in that IPv6 address slice, but "peer synced" sub-slices would be needed.

Like the siblings said, Provider independent IP assignments are available, for v4 and v6 (although to get a v4 assignment in many jurisdictions, you're going to have to go on a waitlist for a long time, or buy addresses from the previous holder). However, most ISPs will require a higher tier connection if you want to bring your own IPs, so it's not something you can usually do on a residential connection.

The processes involved wouldn't really scale if normal people were going to do it either, but if it's something you care deeply about and are willing to spend the time on, it is possible.

As another poster said, you can get a tunnel from Hurricane Electric, or some other tunnel brokers, and that works too, although it's not as flexible --- HE tunnels are not geographically flexible, you pick where your tunnel is assigned, and those addresses will always be routed through that location. If you move far away, you'll likely want to setup a new tunnel in a new location for performance reasons.

> Is it possible for me, or worse, a normal person, to claim or request an ipv6 address that they can keep and use like a phone number?

Yes. You also have to get an ASN though, and an ISP which which will advertise both over BGP.

You don't strictly need an ASN in order to request address space, at least with ARIN. It's possible to have your own IPs, and arrange for someone else to announce them on your behalf, or use them on your local network without routing them globally.

(If you qualify for one, there's little downside to requesting it at the same time as your IPs, though)

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