RIPE NCC

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The RIPE NCC is an independent, not-for-profit membership organisation that supports the infrastructure of the Internet through technical coordination in its service region. The most prominent activity of the RIPE NCC is to act as the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) providing global Internet resources and related services (IPv4, IPv6 and AS Number resources) to members in the RIPE NCC service region. The membership consists mainly of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), telecommunication organisations and large corporations located in Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia.

The RIPE NCC also provides services for the benefit of the Internet community at large. These services include:

  • Administrative support for the RIPE community
  • Outreach activities with governments and industry-related organisations
  • Management of one of the 13 root name servers (K-root)
  • Deployment of a routing database
  • Coordination support for ENUM delegations
  • Neutral measuring network that provides publicly accessible and authoritative statistics on the operation of the Internet.

IPv6 policies in the RIPE NCC service region

Information about the policy development process in RIPE can be found here.

The RIPE NCC executes the IPv6 Address Allocation and Assignment Policy set by the RIPE members.

The following RIPE Documents describe specific RIPE community policies relating to the distribution of IPv6 address space.

IPv6 Address Allocation and Assignment Policy
This document describes policies for the allocation and assignment of globally unique Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) address space to organisation in the RIPE NCC service region. If your organisation plans to obtain IPv6 address space from the RIPE NCC, you should read this document.

This is the policy of most relevance to organisations who wish to obtain a simple allocation of IPv6 address space from the RIPE NCC and use the space for their own infrastructure and also provide services for their customer networks.

IPv6 Address Space Policy for Internet Exchange Points
Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) exchange Internet traffic between different Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Many IXP operators require address space for the peering mesh that is independent from any of the address space in use by member networks.

This document describes the policies under which an IXP operator can obtain an IPv6 address assignment from the RIPE NCC.

IPv6 Addresses for Internet Root Servers in the RIPE Region
This document describes the IPv6 assignment policy for Internet DNS root servers in the RIPE region.

Policy for Reverse Address Delegation of IPv4 and IPv6 Address Space in the RIPE NCC Service Region
Reverse DNS delegations allow applications to map to a domain name from an IP address. Reverse delegation is achieved by use of the special domain names in-addr.arpa (IPv4) and ip6.arpa (IPv6).

This document describes the policy for reverse delegation of IPv4 and IPv6 address space in the RIPE NCC service region.

Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Policy for Allocation of IPv6 Blocks to Regional Internet Registries
This is a global policy document that governs the allocation of IPv6 address space from the IANA (the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, responsible for managing the global pool of free IP addresses) to the RIRs. The policy was agreed on by all five RIR regions and then was implemented by ICANN, which oversees the IANA.

IPv6 Address Space Management
This policy describes how the RIRs manage the IPv6 address blocks allocated to them by the IANA. RIRs allocate this space to Local Internet Registries (LIRs) according to a “sparse allocation” algorithm, which maximises aggregation of address space (an important consideration for routing of Internet traffic) and ensures that most ISPs retain a single prefix as they grow.

The document also describes the registration process and the administration of the ip6.arpa domain (used for reverse DNS registration of IPv6 addresses).