Tony Hain wrote:
There is no discussion of the point raised in the intro about the scaling impact on the public routing system. I would suggest after the last paragraph of section 2: Being overly conservative on end site assignment size also has a direct impact on the potential size of the global routing system. When longer prefixes are assigned to end sites, the public routing table has the potential to grow 2^n times larger than with shorter prefixes. Many of the same people that complain about assigning the same size prefix to large enterprises and home users also complain about the scale of the public routing system, without acknowledging that the longer prefixes make that problem worse.
It's a huge leap from "potential size" to "make that problem worse".In a nutshell, the router-slot usage problem is a demand-side problem - there is a real need for reliable internet presence (not just client-side connectivity).
And, using assignment policy to address this is a supply-side solution. Those don't generally work for demand-side problems (q.v. the war on drugs).
The real place this needs to be addressed is in the solution space to multi-homing. Currently the only viable answer for multihoming is PI space (in both v4 and v6).
Until we come up with a better solution, the scaling problem fundamentally cannot be prevented.
As such, I have to disagree with Tony on this one; the recommendation fits well with the long-term goal of conserving limited (albeit enormous) resources.
Brian Dickson