The Big Squeeze

Sun Mar 2 15:15:42 UTC 1997

On Sun, 2 Mar 1997, Sean Donelan wrote:

> Except the current allocation practices seem at odds with the
> goal of minimizing route table growth.  Why is it better to
> allocate several non-agregatable blocks that are 'just' the
> right size rather than one aggregatable block the next size
> larger?  

Because a very large number of people who get space from the nic cant cut
it and don't grow. Then the block is fine, or needs to be taken back. It
is not fun to renumber a /19, but it can be done. Yes, this is more work
then a lot of the large backbone providers have to deal with as far as IP
apace, but they have been around longer and went through many other
problems.

> So which do providers really want to minimize, the number
> of route entries or the size of individual route entries?

Number of routes, I know of 2 ISPs that we provided access to that were
mad because the nic gave them /19 and not /18. The providers are now out
of business and there are 2 /19 not being used, but at least they are not
/18. If the provider did get larger the nic would have gladly taken back
the /19 and given them a /18.

Nathan Stratton                                President, NetRail,Inc.
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