Address clustering intuition

Fri Nov 10 02:16:40 UTC 1995

On Thu, 9 Nov 1995, Walter O. Haas wrote:

| This has probably been thought of before, or discussed on some other list,
| and if so I apologize in advance.
| 
| I've formed an intuition that, if all IP addresses were portable (ie.
| independent of ISP) and assigned on a strictly geographic basis, then
| there would *automatically* be clustering of addresses equivalent to
| that obtained from CIDRization as a result of marketplace forces and
| the practicalities of technology.
| 
| Note that this results from the address being, not the property of the
| ISP or the end user, but rather of a geographic location.  In other words
| under my scheme if I picked up and moved a hundred miles I'd have to
| renumber, but if I just switched ISPs I wouldn't.
| 
| -- Walt
| 

   This is akin to the DNIC (X.121)addressing scheme used in X.25
networks.  The first few octets of the address specified the continent,
backbone network on that continent, and geographic region (area code). 
   This sure made routing very easy as the address contained intelligance 
rather than just a mish-mash of numbers.  Routing is accomplished by the 
first few octets *only* untill the packet arrived within its destination 
area code, then full address routing would take place.

      --- Jay Nugent