Cogent move without renumbering

Fri Oct 7 19:06:26 UTC 2005

wsimpson at greendragon.com (William Allen Simpson) writes:

> I remember presenting a paper at IETF over a decade ago about assigning
> IP addresses to exchanges instead of carriers.  That would allow rapid
> failover, and promote competition.

and i remember hearing you present this.

> Therefore, I propose that we identify those ISPs moving from Level3 to
> Cogent that are also connected to an *IX.  The IP block should be
> reassigned by the registry to the IX.
> 
> We should encourage everybody else moving that requires a circuit change
> to connect to an IX where Cogent is present.
> 
> That should help routing tables immensely!

IX's are not, alas, the center of the internet, no matter what anybody's
marketing might say.  the vast majority of traffic exchange is by private
interconnect, which might be an IX crossconnect, but might just as likely
be some kind of ISO-L1 or ISO-L2 link through a metro or telco or whatever.

there is no justification for making an IX into an address allocator or
address aggregator, unless it's an ISO-L3 IX with regulatory powers, which
isn't the norm in most places around the world, and isn't likely to become
such, even if it were uncontroversial, which it also isn't.
-- 
Paul Vixie