[NIC-960209.1757] Routing Problem (fwd)
Simon Chan
chan at mibx.com
Tue Feb 13 01:15:10 UTC 1996
> On Mon, 12 Feb 1996, Paul Ferguson wrote:
>
> > Creating a consortium [akin to the NAP model] of small ISP's could
> > easily resolve this problem, if all address space allocated to each
> > ISP was contiguous and could be aggregated to a larger prefix.
> >
> > This has been suggested on numerous occasions.
>
> It's not only been suggested, but I believe it's been somewhat
> implemented. :) Back in September '94, Chris Alan (Electriciti) and a few
> others came up with an idea called PCH -- Packet Clearing House.
>
> The primary concept was, as you suggested, connect a bunch of small ISPs
> together using shared resources and address space and peer with the "big
> boyz." Unfortunately I haven't been involved with it lately, so hopefully
> someone that has can share if it was successful or not.
>
>
> -jh-
>
>
The unfortunate requirement of such scheme to work is that
all address space allocated to the small ISP's has to be contiquous so that it
could be aggregated to a larger prefix under an autonomous system.
Given the completely arbitrary manner adopted by the Internic's
address allocation policy, (eg. 4 C's to ISP A, skip a few C's, 8 C's
to ISP B where A and B can be 4,000 miles apart) it is safe to assume
that the small chunks of C class addresses are geographically
dispersed throughout the States with many holes still unassigned or
unaccounted for. If you are talking about swamp, this is it.
However, a survey for how those chunks of address got broken up into
many different places perhaps can help in the direction of finding
such solution. If these small IP pieces can be grouped together
according to their geographic locations, there is chance that some
broken chunks may be pieced together to form large enough piece by
pure luck. If such solution exists, I am sure someone would be
interested in forming such regional consortiums to help salvage the once lost
IP addresses.
SC
SC
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