Re: Newbie Question about addressing impacts

[Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch@muada.com>]

On 15-aug-04, at 3:06, Christian Huitema wrote:

> The IPv4 routing tables currently have about 100,000 entries, and the 
> sky is not falling.

I'm not so sure. I have several customers who are experiencing random 
BGP instabilities from time to time. I haven't figured this out 
completely yet, but there seems to be a disconnect between the number 
of BGP routes and the amount of processing they require (MD5...) and 
the CPU speed in the routers.

> 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...

We can argue whether this is desirable, but a more fundamental 
objection is that this implicitly assumes one route per company. In 
other words: companies must transport internet traffic between 
different sites over their own infrastructure. That's not very cost 
effective these days.