Re: [RRG] Providers and providers

[jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)]

    > From: David Conrad <drc@virtualized.org>

    > any attempt to create an architecture that depends on some subjective
    > term like 'large' is doomed to fail.

Well, I did provide a very specific formal definition of 'large enough to
get their own chunk of top-level location namespace':

    >> if you decide the DFZ can handle E entries, and the total size of the
    >> network is N nodes, if a company has more than N/E nodes, it gets PI
    >> locators, and if it has less than N/E, it doesn't


But there is still your other point:

    > there will always be pressure to liberalize the allocation policy,
    > resulting in the exact same mess we're in now

which I completely agree with. The problem is that there's always going to be
a gray area in terms of what an acceptable top-level 'chunk' size is, i.e.
how big E can be:

    >> It all depends on lots of factors (e.g. how much
    >> memory/processing/bandwidth overhead you want your path computations to
    >> consume, how efficient you want the paths to be, etc, etc).

In a network with 10^12 nodes, having 10^2 top-level 'chunks' is trivial, and
having 10^10 is definitely not workable. But do you decide to set it at 10^5,
or 10^6, or where? So instead of the fight being about 'is my organization
big enough', it will simply turn into 'why don't you set E large enough so
that my organization qualifies'.

Ultimately, it's a resource allocation question, and the best answer we've
ever discovered to allocating resources is a market, with pricing. However,
there's still resistance to doing that.


Have any providers made public statements about how small a prefix they will
route? I know in the past there have been some on the v4 side, but has anyone
said anything about v6?	Presumbably they won't route /128's, but has anyone
made explicit what their policy will be?

You can view such filtering as a simplistic price function: below size X,
cost is infinite, above it, it's free...

if one large ISP steps up and says 'we won't route blocks below size X',
where X is a lot larger than most PI blocks, all of a sudden PI blocks won't
look so attractive any more...

	Noel

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