Creating a Circuit ID Format

Tue Aug 22 21:20:20 UTC 2017

James Bensley wrote:
> In my opinion the circuit ID should be an abitrary (but unique) value
> and nothing more. As Nick suggested start at 1 and go up. If your
> company is called ABC Ltd then maybe have your first circuit ID as
> ABC00000001 and count up from there, it's as simple as that.

there are a lot of ways of handling this, which broadly speaking break
down into whether you want to encode data in your circuit ID or whether
you want it to act as nothing more than an index on a database table.

Regardless of what way you go about things, there are some parallel
issues, including whether you want inline checksumming, whether you want
random value increases or +1 increases, and whether you want an
alphanumeric or strictly numeric ID.  Alphanumeric can allow unique
prefixes or suffixes to help identify who owns a circuit ID or what type
it is, at the complexity of adding identifiers which can be
misinterpreted over the phone.

There are differing opinions on whether other information such as
service type, node location, speed, etc should be encoded in the service
name.

Things that most people generally agree on include:

- carefully splitting out service types.  E.g. a fibre cable to a
location is one ID; a wavelength on that service is another ID of
another type; an IP transit service on that wave is a third ID, etc.

- don't reuse IDs, ever.  There are plenty of numbers out there.

- don't change from one ID mechanism to another, if possible.

Otherwise, for every well-reasoned suggestion to use a specific format,
there are other well-reasoned arguments to do things in a different way.
 Choose one and stick with it.

Nick