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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: [NIC-960209.1757] Routing Problem (fwd)
> On Mon, 12 Feb 1996, Paul Ferguson wrote: > > > Creating a consortium [akin to the NAP model] of small ISP's could > > easily resolve this problem, if all address space allocated to each > > ISP was contiguous and could be aggregated to a larger prefix. > > > > This has been suggested on numerous occasions. > > It's not only been suggested, but I believe it's been somewhat > implemented. :) Back in September '94, Chris Alan (Electriciti) and a few > others came up with an idea called PCH -- Packet Clearing House. > > The primary concept was, as you suggested, connect a bunch of small ISPs > together using shared resources and address space and peer with the "big > boyz." Unfortunately I haven't been involved with it lately, so hopefully > someone that has can share if it was successful or not. > > > -jh- > > The unfortunate requirement of such scheme to work is that all address space allocated to the small ISP's has to be contiquous so that it could be aggregated to a larger prefix under an autonomous system. Given the completely arbitrary manner adopted by the Internic's address allocation policy, (eg. 4 C's to ISP A, skip a few C's, 8 C's to ISP B where A and B can be 4,000 miles apart) it is safe to assume that the small chunks of C class addresses are geographically dispersed throughout the States with many holes still unassigned or unaccounted for. If you are talking about swamp, this is it. However, a survey for how those chunks of address got broken up into many different places perhaps can help in the direction of finding such solution. If these small IP pieces can be grouped together according to their geographic locations, there is chance that some broken chunks may be pieced together to form large enough piece by pure luck. If such solution exists, I am sure someone would be interested in forming such regional consortiums to help salvage the once lost IP addresses. SC SC
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