RE: Provider Independent addressing format drafts

[Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch@muada.com>]

On Mon, 22 Oct 2001, Tony Hain wrote:

> Lots of people
> hold the belief it won't work, but how many of those are based on a
> simple resistance to think differently about the possible solution
> space?

Ok, so it can work. But does it have any real advantages? I don't see
them. If we want geo addressing, why not apply some brain power and come
up with something that works better. The problem with a direct translation
between location and address is that there are locations that need very
few addresses and there are locations that need very many. Also, the
boundaries will be in impractical places. For instance, half of London is
in the western hemisphere, the other half in the eastern hemisphere. So
should there be a LINX East and a LINX West then?

Doing the translation by hand means you can give areas the number of
addresses they need and you can have the boundaries where they should be:
where the interconnection is sparse (ie North Sea and not one of the
busiest cities of Europe).

On the other hand: direct mapping between addresses and locations could be
_very_ interesting if we had geo routing. For instance, a satellite or
UMTS base station could decide which antenna to use to transmit a packet
based on the address. But this doesn't seem to be happening.

I still believe is some form of geo addressing, but it has one huge
disadvantage: you need to be fully interconnected within the region. With
current multihoming, two networks could lose all their interconnects in
(for instance) the US and there would still be some level of reachability
through interconnects in other parts of the world. With geo addressing,
this isn't possible.

I'm starting to think we should give large address blocks to commercial
organizations who will then negotiate what kind of announcements will be
accepted within that block. This way, someone who wants their /24 (v4) or
/48 (v6) in the DMZ can do this by paying a large sum of money to one of
these address brokers, who will make sure it happens by paying the
networks to accept them. Obviously, this will not stop the routing table
growth but at least it will introduce the laws of supply and demand so
those who supply can buy bigger routers with the money from those who
demand.