A call for the future. Was: Re: Verio Decides what parts of the internet to drop

Tue Dec 7 02:27:07 UTC 1999

Kai Schlichting <kai at pac-rim.net> writes:
>And what I'd really like to know: how many millions and billions were spent
>by domestic telcos to accomodate and ultimately deflect anti-trust action
>heading their way regaring local, 800 (and soon: cellular, at last!)
>number portability ? (lets call it xNP)
>
>I mean: there must be an order of magnitude of increased HD space,
>RAM and SS7 network bandwidth in use right now due to xNP.
>Which means that the telcos probably asked their vendors to provide
>such capabilities for their switches - and got what they asked for!
>
>Lets face it: if the US PSTN can accomodate tens of millions of essentially
>freely-routed (well, the stubs of the SS7 network are certainly very static,
>heh) phone numbers, it must be possible to scale the Internet beyond such
>a small pisser: a 1/4 million routes in the BGP table.

The issue isn't in storing hundreds of thousands, millions,
or tens of millions of routes.  This is, all things considered,
a piece of cake.

The issue is getting the route out of storage, for each packet coming
through the router, at a rate of millions of packets per second for
each core router.  Each IP core router is doing about the same
lookup work as the whole combined PSTN network is for all of its
freely routed numbers.  It is, or should be, quite viable... but not
easy, as we've all found.

-george william herbert
gherbert at crl.com