*LA questions [was Re: initial issues]

[Brian E Carpenter <brian@hursley.ibm.com>]

Randy Bush wrote:
> 
> > - a SLA, or a leaf site (/48)
> > - an NLA, or small ISP (/n, where n < 48)
> > - a TLA, or big ISP (/16, /29-35 sTLA, or /24-28 pTLA)
> 
> please remove *LA terms.  they are dead.
> 
> the operational community learned long ago that, for many reasons, we can
> not say small/medium/large site/isp/registry.  we start allocations with
> smaller windows and increase the window size based on actual utilization.

Randy, since I haven't seen any discussion of this on the ipngwg list
I will ask my two questions here - it seems to be key to multi6, although
the proposal to drop the *LA designations is a mainstream ipngwg issue
that I assume we will soon be debating there.

1. Are you asserting that concept of a site is dead? If not, then SLA 
and /48 is definitely not dead. (If yes, then we have a big problem 
but I won't argue it here and now.)

2. Are you asserting that concept of a hierarchy of providers is dead?
In other words do you think that the idea that lay behind the TLA/NLA
split - that local providers hang off less local providers - is totally
broken, or is it merely the definition of fixed boundaries in the
TLA..NLA portion of the address that is viewed as a problem? Note, I'm
not hung up at all on the terminology of "top level" and "next level".
I'm just trying to understand what you think will happen in the
topology.

  Brian