IPv6 news

Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com
Tue Oct 18 14:33:07 UTC 2005


> 1. Does the US have number portability anywhere? If so, that would be 
> a /huge/ region, and very interesting to examine to see how they 
> manage it.

In the USA this is called LNP (Local Number Portability).

This article has a couple of pages of history and then
a technical overview of how LNP works.
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/JOTS/Winter-Spring-2001/pdf/obermier.pdf

This document explains the architecture of LNP in
today's phone network:
http://www.verisign.com/stellent/groups/public/documents/white_paper/001950.pdf

However, LNP is not as simple as most laypeople think.
It has other applications than simply consumer 
convenience. For instance, disaster recovery
http://www.neustar.com/pressroom/datasheets/DisasterRecPress.pdf

Read this description of number pooling
http://www.verisign.com/stellent/groups/public/documents/white_paper/001949.pdf
and reflect on how similar this seems to injecting
longer prefixes into BGP (hole punching) to support
moving a customer from another network.

LNP and routing are the same problem. The details of
the solutions differ because the technology environment
and constraints differ. But you will never understand
IP routing unless you understand how non-IP networks
solve these same problems. That's why some people use
RIP to teach routing even though it is considered bad
practice to run RIP on any network in this day and age.
People need to learn routing theory separately
from "How to configure BGP on your brand-X boxes".

--Michael Dillon




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