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Re: regionalized addresses, RIRs, and table size

On zondag, okt 12, 2003, at 17:23 Europe/Amsterdam, Ray Plzak wrote:

[geographic addressing]

This has been discussed in regard to the minimum allocation from the
IANA to the RIRs in all the regions.  There has been no conclusion
reached in regards to a policy, which by the way would be a global
policy and would have to pass through the ASO Address Council and the
ICANN Board.

I'm unaware of what has been discussed in that forum, but geographic addressing only makes sense if it enables geographic aggregation, which isn't an entirely trivial excercise.

Geographic addressing has been discussed extensively on a non-IETF mailinglist about multihoming in IPv6 and our conclusion was that a /16 for geographic addressing where the allocation of addresses is based on population would work well. The minimum "allocation" would be a /32 for a region with around 350.000 inhabitants, but since such a region isn't an addressable entity in network terms these blocks wouldn't be allocated in the current sense; this type of address space would have to be held by the RIRs and be directly assigned to end-users based on their location. (Obviously the "paper work" could still be done by an intermediary such as an ISP so the RIR part could be fully automated.)

A /24 (presumably out of 6bone space) could be used in a field experiment, but /48s would run out fairly quick in network-intensive areas such as Silicon Valley with not much more than one /48 per 2500 inhabitants while the current usage of AS numbers is around one in 30000 for Europe and the US.

More than a /16 would be unworkable as presumably flat routing would be needed in cities and even with a /16 that means flat routing for millions of /48s in the largest metropolitan areas.