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Re: Newbie Question about addressing impacts

Is it, really? The IPv4 routing tables currently have about 100,000
entries, and the sky is not falling. So we should assume that 100,000
entries is OK now, in 2004. If I remember correctly, the equivalent
limit was about 10,000 entries in 2004, ten times less ten years ago. We
might imagine that the limit will be ten times higher ten years from
now.

The entire earth population is not expected to reach 10 billion people
any time soon, which means there cannot possibly be more than 100,000
companies with 100,000 employees world wide, or a million companies with
10,000 employees. This pretty much implies that we could flat-route all
the companies with 100,000 employees now, and all of those with 10,000
employees ten years from now...



You're absolutely right Christian, and since memory is cheap, we should
seriously consider ditching this IP business. Let's just bridge everything
together. In ten years, we'll be able to support 10 billion MAC addresses
in our bridging tables and we'll avoid all of these routing issues.

</sarcasm>

In case folks have not noticed, thanks to certain people carrying other stuff
in inter-domain protocols, the minimal requirement today is to carry 1e6
routes already. This number is driven by the Internet routing table size,
as people want to be able to support carrier-of-carrier VPNs, resulting
in VPNs that are part of the default-free zone (DFZ).

If we grow the Internet routing table to say 1e6 routes, then the VPN
demands will be something like 1e7 or 1e8.  This will be yet another
tax on the carriers and will get passed on to us, the consumers.

I think that it is in our common interest to keep the routing subsystem
efficient, stable, and cheap.  Saying that we don't have a problem
today because the sky is not falling is like saying that nothing is
wrong because we're not dead yet, so go right ahead, have another
<insert your favorite self-destructive vice>.  Those of us who would
like to live a wee bit longer will excercise a modicum of moderation
in how we treat the common infrastructure.

Regards,
Tony