Re: The state of IPv6 multihoming development

["Craig A. Huegen" <chuegen@cisco.com>]

On Tue, 22 Oct 2002, J. Noel Chiappa wrote:

> Multi-homing is an additional "service" (if you will) of the network, a
> service that provides additional benefits. You don't get additional benefits
> without a price. (The old "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"
> principle.)

Without multi-homing, demand for the network will be severely reduced
because end-users will not see the IPv6 as a reliable network to do
business on.

> The benefit of multi-homing has a price - the only question is, who's going
> to pay the price? Simple fairness demands that it *ought* to be the entity
> which directly benefits. Multiple connectivity-based addresses do this; the
> end-site has to pay the bulk of the cost (in complexity, etc).

Content consumers benefit from the content providers being multi-homed,
just as content providers benefit from the content consumers being
multi-homed.  You can't make the argument that benefit is solely or even
primarily with the end-user that multihomes.

The cost of multiple PA/CA/whateveryouwanttocallthem addresses is far too
much compared with the return.  The complexity of multiple PA prefixes
across an infrastructure that has tens of thousands of subnets is
phenomenal from an operations perspective.

/cah

---
Craig A. Huegen, Chief Network Architect      C i s c o  S y s t e m s
IT Transport, Network Technology & Design           ||        ||
Cisco Systems, Inc., 400 East Tasman Drive          ||        ||
San Jose, CA  95134, (408) 526-8104                ||||      ||||
email: chuegen@cisco.com       CCIE #2100      ..:||||||:..:||||||:..