Tony,Well, unless there is some significant change, the ALT approach seemed to suggest that there would be a single mapping provider advertising a specific aggregate into the ALT topology. Thus, I would assume that the aggregation would occur at the mapping provider. There are many possible approaches to explore. For instance, one could cluster providers, for instance, in a non-geographic fashion and aggregate above them, much the same way that OpenSRS worked in the early days of the domain registrars. This would be a huge selling point for an alliance. We really don't know what sort of performance we need out of an ALT provider or of the ALT as a whole. This to me is also an area of further research. I think we can say with certainty that the volume of BGP messages will be lower than that of what there is today, but even here there is room for research. For instance, when should peering be made and when should a route simply be announced from the provider without any direct contact from the subscriber? What are the performance impacts and to whom? |Also, keep |in mind that the primary function of a mapping provider is to |provide a |stable EID prefix, so this sort of change should be extremely rare!! I suspect that the primary function of the mapping provider will be to be profitable. ;-) True enough! As long as it remains a for-profit service, it would seem that it would create this issue and the size of the vendor lock created would be directly proportional to the pain of renumbering the site. This suggests that the mapping provider could then raise rates so that they charged just slightly less than the cost of renumbering and could then milk the user base. As an Enterprise I would be very concerned about such a possibility, and would want to somehow future proof myself against it. This is why something like the simple case I gave above will need to be explored and evolved. Eliot |