RE: (multi6) requirements draft comments

["Tony Hain" <alh-ietf@tndh.net>]

J. Noel Chiappa wrote:
> No - at least not the way you seem to be meaning when you say
> those words).
> I.e. you seem to think everyone with service from Verizon DSL
> and Cox Cable
> would share the same prefix - which is distinctly not what I meant.
>
> What I meant was that all the people who are connected to both:
>
> - i) the same segment of the York County Cox CATV system here
> in Virginia,
> 	and
> - ii) the same Verizon DSL office

Just checking, because you distinctly claimed a difference from metro,
but in your example you have an implicit metro context.


> Anyone thinking about anything related to routing needs to
> take a sharp
> implement, and engrave on their forehead "REAL TOPOLOGY IS
> KING". For routing,
> the *only* thing that matters is *actual* connectivity; i.e.
> the actual wires
> and routers.
...
> The other thing that people need to keep firmly in mind is
> the K-K lesson,
> which is that the way you get the routing to scale, even in
> mindbogglingly
> large networks, is to use LOTS OF LAYERS OF ABSTRACTION.

I am sure you are well aware of the contradiction in those two
statements in the abstract, and the fact that the latter is why people
frequently loose focus on the former. The piece that sits in between
those two viewpoints of the world is the practical reality of the
routing protocol technology and the application of that by mere mortal
(though frequently sub-human) operators. Yes we need to focus on real
topology, but practical reality of current technology says that we need
to constrain the degrees in freedom to something managable. We know how
to aggregate when all the end sites play nice and constrain their
service to a single ISP, but they refuse to do that. We also know how to
implement a scalable metro approach, but ISPs refuse to do that. Since
the end sites are the holders of the money, the ISPs will eventually
loose this battle, and lacking any revolutionary technology will have to
implement some degree of metro. My suggestion is that they do this as an
overlay to the PA system so they get the best of both worlds.

Tony