IPv6 news

Mon Oct 17 11:51:41 UTC 2005

Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com wrote:
>>Another alternative is to force-align allocation and topology in some 
>>way /other/ than by "Providers" (geographical allocation in whatever 
>>hierarchy, IX allocation, whatever), such that networks were easily 
>>aggregatable. Lots of objections though (the "providers and geography 
>>don't align" one though is ultimately slightly bogus, because with 
>>non-provider-aligned allocation policies in place it would be in 
>>providers interests to align their peering to match the allocation 
>>policy).
> 
> I think we need a researcher to sit down and 
> figure out exactly what this would look like
> in a sample city and a sample national provider.
> 
> This is one of those inversion situations where
> we are turning the existing model inside out. Some
> people may be familiar with the inversion of 
> control in user interfaces that came about when
> Windows/Macintosh became the standard UI.
> 
> Here, the suggestion is that netblocks should
> be allocated to cities, not to providers. Within
> a city, providers would get a subset of the city
> address block to meet their local infrastructure
> needs. They would interconnect with each other
> a local exchange points to exchange local traffic
> as Paul Vixie is suggesting here:
> http://news.com.com/5208-1028-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=10554&messageID=77189&start=-1
> 
> Addresses from other cities would be viewed as
> a single aggregate for that city and these could
> be even further aggregated at some regional level
> such as Northwest, Southwest, Midwest, Southeast
> and Northeast.

Err...  Sounds awfully like E.164.  Why don't we use phone number instead
of IP numbers?  We all know how well carrier phone number routing and number
portability works, don't we?

> It's different than what we have now, but not
> extremely different. It is doable with IPv6 without
> any protocol changes because there is sufficient
> reserve address space available. It meets the concept
> of Internet as utility or mission-critical Internet
> because it mandates local interconnect. The customer
> point of view is that low latency and consistent
> latency is best and that mandates local interconnect.

I'm sorry, but your geographical approach is broken by design.

-- 
Andre