Re: Newbie Question about addressing impacts

[Tony Li <tony.li@tony.li>]

> 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.


If PI addresses are made widely available, then the routing table will
grow.  As the routing table grows, each carrier must grow its tables
to support default-free routing.  To be able to provide VPN services, 
the
carrier must be able to support all of the routes that his customers
wish to support.  Since several of these customers could reasonably
be Tier 1 backbones, they will be carrying the full table.  Thus, there
is an amplification factor (currently about 10x) of the size of the
table vs. what routers have to hold.  If that grows (as seems likely
as the size of the DFZ grows), then the amplification times the
natural growth of the table will continue to push technology.

> 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".


Well, I don't think that "illegal" is possible, given that we are not
a legislative entity.  I don't think that anyone would object to a
market for routing table entries, but it has yet to appear.

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


No, I don't think that's sufficient.  We have yet to see any type of
cost shifting occur.  For that to happen, we would have to have a market
and the fact that it does NOT exist means that we don't have a mechanism
to work with.  Yes, this is an economic, not technical issue.  However,
we as technologists have the responsibility to raise the awareness of
this and to promote prefix conservation.


Tony