RE: Newbie Question about addressing impacts

["Christian Huitema" <huitema@windows.microsoft.com>]

> 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 am sorry, but I don't get the VPN point. The number of VPN is
proportional to the number of sites willing to establish VPN
connections, and not linked to the availability of global addresses for
these sites.

Eric is making a basic point of economics. Large companies will want to
get a global address, effectively shifting network management cost from
their IT department to the ISP community. A number of folks in this
group believe this is a bad idea, and are essentially trying to write in
the standards that such cost shifting should be illegal. I personally
don't think it should be illegal, although I am ready to admit that it
should be expensive, as in "no free lunch".

Your mention that routers commonly support 1E6 routing entries seems to
indicate that some amount of "cost shifting" is indeed feasible.

By the way, routing in a flat space of 10 billion entries is also
feasible, using distributed hash tables. However, with the current
algorithms, the average path length will be markedly larger than the
shortest path.

-- Christian Huitema