Re: The state of IPv6 multihoming development

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

On Wed, 30 Oct 2002, RJ Atkinson wrote:

> I think it is important to understand what the deployed reality is
> today.
> That impacts how widely useful some solutions might be, particularly
> in the case of so-called "geographic addressing".  I also think it
> is important to understand when a given solution will not work with
> some/all deployed networks.  Financial realities mean that an IETF
> document standardising a solution that requires more interconnection
> probably will not lead to firms changing their topologies anytime soon
> to meet such a requirement.

Nobody is proposing a solution that needs more exchanges in order to be
useful. Just to be safe I've included a statement to this effect in the
abstract of draft-van-beijnum-multi6-isp-int-aggr-00.txt. New exchanges
would only be necessary if this solution were to be used much longer
than intended, but as we approach one multihomer in 10 people even flat
routing for a single city such as New York, Tokio or Mexico City will be
problematic.

> > Granted the logical circuit topology is not limited
> > to that, but again, how many real exceptions will exist, and how many
> > of those will exist despite every attempt to prevent them?

> A fair number of exceptions exist today.

But then what's common today may be tomorrow's exception and the other
way around. For instance, someone with ADSL doing BGP routing with IPv6
and a "real" AS number is very rare today, while the number of
organizations connecting to the internet in far apart locations is
something that regularly happens (although I suspect the actual number
isn't all that high). In the future, this will very likely be different.
It could even be argued that existing cases are of no importance to
routing scalability and it's enough to make new cases scalable.

Also note that as of today, NO end-user networks are multihomed in IPv6.

Iljitsch