And Now for Something Completely Different (was Re: IPv6 news)

Mon Oct 17 05:17:15 UTC 2005

On Mon, 17 Oct 2005, Christopher L. Morrow wrote:

> you are getting these anyway, thank network convergence for that... or 
> curse it, your call. things like 2547 'vpn' and the like are driving 
> prefix numbers up regardless of what the Internet is doing. Hardware 
> will be required to handle million(s) of prefixes sooner than large 
> scale v6 deployment IMHO.

Both MPLS and any tunneled VPN over IP means the core won't have to know 
about all those prefixes (think aggregation of addresses regionally in the 
IP case and outer label in the MPLS case).

So if you're building a 100G capable platform that'll do IPv6 and MPLS, 
how much difference would it be if you only had to support 16000 labels 
and 16000 IPv6 prefixes, rather than 2 million?

Then of course I guess the argument can be made to put everything on MPLS 
to avoid the core knowing about anything but outer labels.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se