CIDR FAQ

Wed Aug 16 00:50:56 UTC 1995

   Uh, I've seen PC's with Gigabytes of RAM, but have yet to hear
   of a router with such.  

True.  There's no market yet.

   CIDR is a bandaid.

If you seriously believe that, then you better present some other
mechanism for scaling routing.  We know of only one: hiearachical
routing.

   The problem is
   translating from from BGP to forwarding tables installed in routers.

Sorry, no.  There are a number of problems.  This isn't one.

   Current routers do not have enough BGP processing power to
   do the BGP filtering and processing power.  

I have about 100 counterexamples.  Obviously, you can configure
arbitrarily complex filtering and if you do that, you need an
arbitrarily large amount of compute power.  The fact is that there's
enough to work today.

   The other problem is the mesh nature of BGP which makes any BGP
   peering site, with full mesh peering, an N^2 problem.  

This is fixed.

   Seeing as memory is typical 1/2 the price
   for a workstation as for a Cisco router, you can almost aford to
   have 4 BILLION host routes in the workstation, compared to the cost
   of the replacing your entire backone with the Cisco of the Month Club.

No one said that you had to buy the memory for your cisco from cisco.

Tony