Sensible geographical addressing [Was: 16 vs 32 bit ASNs yadda, yadda]

Tue Nov 30 15:29:16 UTC 2004

In the interconnected world, geography is very much irrelevant to best path
routing.  It's all about speeds and feeds where a local-access T-1 is
obviously not preferable to a cross-country OC-3.

Sounds nice on paper, but isn't really where things are at these days.  Now
on the other hand if bandwidth were unlimited and we all had great
super-duper links between every ISP regardless of tier, THEN geographical
routing would make sense.

Whether you have 16 or more geographical locations doesn't necessarily
equate to geographic routing.  It's still longest prefix match which may be
interrupted by misconfigured filters, or other circumstances.  

This is what happens when we try to borrow ideas from the 40-50-year-old
telecom world and how basic call-routing worked in a TDM environment.

Scott

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu] On Behalf Of
Michael.Dillon at radianz.com
Sent: Tuesday, November 30, 2004 9:28 AM
To: nanog at merit.edu
Subject: Sensible geographical addressing [Was: 16 vs 32 bit ASNs yadda,
yadda]

> Anything that takes geography into the routing is plain and simple 
> broken.

Then why do major American providers require peers to be in 16 or more
geographic locations? Why do people aggregate addresses geographically in
their networks? It can't all be broken.