Pros and cons of different address types

We have discussed different ways of getting IPv6 addresses to use in your deployment: from your ISP, provider independent or becoming an ISP for your own organisation. Here we put those different options side by side and discuss why you would choose one or the other.

The first thing to realise is that technically all these addresses are equal. An address is just a number to use as source and destination in an IP packet. The differences discussed here are only related to who is responsible for addresses. These different responsibilities can affect the way you use addresses, whether you are allowed to keep using addresses after your contracts with ISPs change and whether it is possible to share responsibility for routing between multiple ISPs. But in the end they are all just numbers and one type of addresses is not better than another.

Because the choice of where to get your addresses is dependent on policies and responsibilities there are many things influencing that choice. We tried to put the most important aspects into one table to help you to make the right choice.

In the table below PI refers to getting provider independent addresses, PA refers to using addresses from your ISP and LIR refers to becoming an ISP for your own organisation.