PI/metro/geo [Re: The state of IPv6 multihoming development]

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

Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 24 Oct 2002, J. Noel Chiappa wrote:
> 
> > E.g. if a (large enough) bunch of customers band together and create an
> > exchange, which buys service from multiple ISP's, and which is given an
> > address which is visible over the same scope as those ISP's, and the
> > customers are addressed as part of that exchange, you meet the policy goal
> > (being able to change providers) *without* so-called "PI" addresses. But the
> > addresses are still connectivity-based.
> 
> Semantics. The exchange would be the "provider" here.

The problem with this (and the reason I have serious doubts about
Tony's PI proposal, and all geographical proposals going back at
least to Bill Simpson's metro proposal years ago), is

  There is no economic reason to create such an exchange.

If we could get past that, of course it works. And there isn't much
the IETF can do about it. We could perfectly well make the case to get
the PI block from IANA, but that doesn't get it deployed. As Noel notes,
you don't even need PI space to create an exchange-based addressing
scheme. You don't even need PA space - you could build a metro exchange
using 6to4 space if you were desparate.

> BTW, this looks an awful lot like geographical addressing and
> aggregating. 

Of course.

> Now if we virtualize the exchange that saves a lot of iron.

Pls explain.

  Brian