[routing-wg]BGP Update Report

Wed Sep 13 22:11:43 UTC 2006

Vince Fuller writes:
> On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 12:32:57PM +0200, Oliver Bartels wrote:
>> Ceterum censeo: Nevertheless this moving-clients application shows
>> some demand for a true-location-independend IP-addresses
>> announcement feature (provider independend "roaming") in IPv6, as
>> in v4 (even thru this isn't the "standard" way, but Connexion is
>> anything but standard). Shim etc. is not sufficient ...

Ehm, well, Connexion by Boeing is maybe not such a good example for
this demand.  Leaving aside the question whether there is a business
case, I remain unconvinced that using BGP for mobility is even worth
the effort.  It is obvious that it "worked" for Boeing in IPv4, for
some value of "worked", but the touted delay improvements on the
terrestrial ISP path (ground station - user's "home" ISP) are probably
lost in the noise compared to the 300ms of geostationary.  But, hey,
it's free - just deaggregate a few /19's worth of "PA" (what's that?)
space into /24 and annouce and re-announce at will.

Vince has an outline of an excellent solution that would have avoided
all the load on the global routing system with (at least) the same
performance (provided that the single network/VPN is announced to the
Internet from good locations on multiple continents):

> One might also imagine that more globally-friendly way to implement
> this would have been to build a network (VPN would be adequate)
> between the ground stations and assign each plane a prefix out of a
> block whose subnets are only dynamically advertsed within that
> network/VPN. Doing that would prevent the rest of the global
> Internet from having to track 1000+ routing changes per prefix per
> day as satellite handoffs are performed.

But that would have cost money! Probably just 1% of the marketing
budget of the project or 3% of the cost of equipping a single plane
with the "bump" for the antenna, but why bother? With IPv4 you get
away with advertising de-aggregated /24s from PA space.

At one of the Boeing presentations (NANOG or RIPE) I asked the
presenter how they coped with ISPs who filter.  Instead of responding,
he asked me back "are you from AS3303"?.  From which I deduce that
there are about two ISPs left who filter such more-specifics (AS3303
and us :-).

IMHO Connexion by Boeing's BGP hack, while cool, is a good example of
an abomination that should have been avoided by having slightly
stronger incentives against polluting the global routing system.
Where's Sean Doran when you need him?
-- 
Simon (AS559).