RE: Regionally aggregatable address space for multihoming

[RJ Atkinson <rja@inet.org>]

At 06:43 12/06/01, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
>Today the situation is completely different. Large networks such as
>UUNET/MCI/Worldcom have pan-european networks so in many cases 
>traffic takes the shortest route to other European destinations. 
>Transatlantic capacity is very cheap, but not as cheap as housing 
>a router at the Amsterdam Internet Exchange and exchanging tens 
>or hundreds of megabytes without any traffic charges. Some of the 
>really large networks still don't want to interconnect with the 
>smaller ones, but even the traffic between the small networks 
>is enough to make it worth connecting.

        It is still the case that metro circuits within most major
European cities are most often *more* expensive than equally
sized circuits that run between countries.

        Further, Amsterdam, London, and Stockholm are exceptions
in that each is both a major European city and each has a plausibly
health IP exchange point.  There are a much larger number of
major European cities.  Most have no exchange point at all.
Some have a very small one that isn't really viable at present.

        However, let me suggest that giving and disagreeing
about examples aren't really the focus here, because the world 
is a much larger place than the EU (or the US or AU for that 
matter :-).

        We need a routing/operational/business model that supports
multi-homing globally, not just regionally, and that supports
widespread multi-homing of end users in a manner that does not
adversely impact the health of the global routing system.

        The mere fact that in many places (not all, just many)
local-loop charges are higher than long-distance charges means
that the model we need must be economically sensible when the
long-distance is less expensive than the local loop.

Regards,

Ran
rja@inet.org