Cogent move without renumbering

Fri Oct 7 23:28:03 UTC 2005

Bill Woodcock wrote:
>       On Fri, 7 Oct 2005, William Allen Simpson wrote:
>     > I remember presenting a paper at IETF over a decade ago about assigning
>     > IP addresses to exchanges instead of carriers.
> 
> Yes, that's been debunked many times over at this point.  Still, it occurs 
> to someone new, periodically.  The problem is that the ISPs which matter 
> are at more than one IX, so it results in massively fragmented routing, 
> completely defeating aggregation.  The cure is worse than the disease.
> 
Actually, your memory is incomplete.  Wasn't it Deering who did the
analysis that it would actually _decrease_ the _global_ table to mere
hundreds, but increase the internal routing tables of large carriers?

And didn't the analysis show that the maximum routing table of those
large carriers was still in the few thousand range?  Today's routing
table reports show 167203 and 171237 respectively.  Certainly we're
much worse off now!

And given the perspective of another decade of history, I'd argue that
without the incentive to join IXs, we still have the problem that most
"ISPs that matter" aren't connected to _any_ IX.  (Noted as well by
Paul Vixie in an earlier message.)

-- 
William Allen Simpson
     Key fingerprint =  17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26  DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32