OMB: IPv6 by June 2008

Fri Jul 8 22:17:42 UTC 2005

At 12:08 AM +0200 2005-07-09, Andre Oppermann wrote:

>  The biggest routers are being upgraded anyway because of even higher
>  link speeds and port desities.

	I'm not surprised.  After all, time does march on.

	But it doesn't help if the largest/fastest line cards available 
today are made obsolete overnight by people who have no concept of 
what it costs to route packets at OC-192 or OC-768 line speeds, and 
suggest that all the routers in the world could be replaced by a 
small handful of no-name el-cheapo PCs.

>  A Cisco "CRS-1 16-SLOT LINE-CARD CHASSIS ROUTE PROCESSOR" comes with
>  4 GB of route memory default size.  Juniper's T320 and T640 come with
>  2 GB of main memory default size.  That should take them to some higher
>  number of routes.

	Problem is, a Tier-1 provider is still going to have hundreds or 
thousands of routers that have to be upgraded, and there are a number 
of Tier-1s.  Tier-2s aren't quite as bad off, but although they buy 
some transit from the Tier-1s, they still have a lot of private 
peering and they're not that far out of the DFZ themselves.  And the 
Tier-2s have a lot less money to pay for the ultra-expensive forklift 
upgrades for the BFRs and GSRs and all that other mega-million dollar 
equipment.

	Meanwhile, a surprising number of people have to try and get by 
with linecards having only 128MB of RAM, at least according to RFC 
3869.

>  On the other hand a large DFZ routing table would simply dampen its
>  growth by itself.  If it gets to costly to multihome because of the
>  hardware requirements only few would be able to so.  Ergo we have a
>  negative feedback system here keeping itself in check.  Case solved
>  and closed.

	And Volcanoes nicely solve the population problem for those who 
live too close to them.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.