Robin,
Tony, your statement is the first I have seen to the effect that BGP canbe significantly improved. If you can elaborate here, or offlist, I would really appreciate it.
I've just submitted an Internet draft that outlines the directions that I'm exploring. Look for it sometime next week.
Please note that it is at this point VERY informal and calling it half-baked would at this point be a gross overstatement.
The stumbling block seems to be that no-one things BGP can cope with 2 million or so routes. It seems to me that it could, if routers had alot more RAM (and maybe 64 bit CPUs to easily address it). Gigabytes ofRAM is cheap these days. But it would also be necessary to largelysuppress whatever most router operators deem to be "unnecessary" updates.
The problem is that the flux of necessary updates would still kill you. You're talking about scaling up the static portion of the data by an order of magnitude. To scale up the dynamics, you also have to scale up the processor and memory speeds by an order of magnitude too, divided by whatever savings that we can accomplish. And even then, you're only achieving the same convergence times that we have today, which some people deem to be unacceptable.
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