Verio Peering Question

Pete Kruckenberg pete at kruckenberg.com
Sat Sep 29 21:32:49 UTC 2001


On 29 Sep 2001, Paul Vixie wrote:

> so there's going to be a limit.  the number of routes allowed into a router
> shall be non-infinite.  that limit can be selenforced in a number of ways:
>
> 	1. total number of routes
> 	2. total number of routes per peer
> 	3. prefix length

<sarcasm>
#4 most-used/least-complaining

Analyze NetFlow to determine where 80-90% of your traffic
(by volume or flow-count) originates/terminates, build a
filter to only accept those routes (or ASN's). Your route
table would probably be 20% what it is now. Customers would
fill out a Web form to request routing to filtered blocks,
and the most popular requests would be added.

You could do this for customer routes as well, so you only
advertise the top 80-90% of customer routes, and tell the
rest of your customers they don't use enough bandwidth to
justify a route table entry.
</sarcasm>

Companies are paying money to get more, reliable bandwidth.
There is value-add created by multi-homing that people are
willing to pay for. Those who stand to most benefit from
this demand are not the ma-and-pa ISPs, it's the same big
companies who already own most of the market. Anything that
stops the demand hurts them more than anyone else.

Asymmetric filtering ("I won't accept yours, but expect you
to accept mine") certainly get's people's attention, and if
everyone filtered it would definitely make the problem go
away, at least temporarily.

But the market /will/ be satisfied, you can't permanently
deny the demand for more, reliable bandwidth. Maybe before
you could stop or slow down the train, I think it's likely
now it'll run you over. As long as there isn't a solution
that solves the problem, we'll keep having these same
discussions, with different 'stupid' work-arounds.
Asymmetric filtering does not solve the problem the market
is willing to pay to solve. Progressive dampening and Multi6
look more promising.

Consider where we would be now if the solution to
address-space depletion was 'don't assign any more
addresses'. Thank goodness for a solution (CIDR) that
accomodated the demand in a way that was tolerable for most
people. It wasn't exactly what the customer wanted (their
own portable Class A), but it solved the problem well enough
for most people.

What solution will be analogous to CIDR in this situation?

Pete.




More information about the NANOG mailing list