Re: geo short vs long term? [Re: Geo pros and cons]

["J. Noel Chiappa" <jnc@ginger.lcs.mit.edu>]

    > From: "Michael H. Lambert" <lambert@psc.edu>

    >> Geographic addressing has been discussed extensively about 17 times in
    >> the IETF, and every time it has been rejected. Discussing it one more
    >> time is not going to change this. There is *never* going to be a rough
    >> consensus *in favour of* geographic addressing. There will *always* be
    >> a lot of people against it

    > Since you have more historical context than many of us on the list,
    > could you please summarize the arguments which have been used against
    > geo? I suspect that they are mainly financial and political, but there
    > might be technical issues I'm unaware of.

Actually, I don't think that's quite correct: the argument against it is in
fact rooted in technical issues, although there are non-technical issues
in the later stages.

The analysis of geographic has been fairly well summarized in recent
discussion here on the list, but very simply, it goes:

- i) for the overhead of the routing to scale, the hierarchy of addressing
abstractions has to be reasonably closely related to the actual
interconnection topology;
- ii) this means that either connectivity has to follow addressing, or
addressing has to follow connectivity;
- iii) the IETF cannot mandate where connectivity gets added;
- iv) connectivity gets put in where there are actual traffic flows and/or
commercial reasons to put it in.

Therefore we have to have the addressing follow the connectivity, and an
addressing scheme such as geographic, which to scale needs to have the
connectivity follow the addressing, is not feasible.

	Noel


PS: Everyone, about the "this is stupid" comment - that wasn't directed at
anyone in particular, but at all of us, me included. I suddenly had my brain
start to function, and realized that there is never going to be *rough
consensus in favour of geographic* - which is what we'd need to go forward
with it - and therefore further discussion thereof is not useful. I hope I
didn't offend anyone - if I did, my apologies.