On 22-jul-2007, at 13:37, Nick Hilliard wrote:
Can we agree to consign the idea of geographic addressing to the scrap heap where it belongs, please? It's not going to work, ever - and we need tostop pretending that it has any future.
Obviously geographic addressing will work just fine: if all else fails, just ignore the geographic component and use the addresses the same way as any other type. The question is whether the geographic component is going to buy us anything. The classic argument is that topology isn't aligned with geography so it doesn't. However, there are only so many sea cables and the world is a big place. Being able to ignore more specific routes from the other side of the globe seems like something that could come in handy to me.
It will work the day that theInternet (big "I") is operated as a strict tree structure, which is to say,never.
Sure, a tree with a single root would be great. But 7000 trees for 7000 regions with 1 million inhabitants would still be a huge win. Within the region you can do flat routing.