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Re: [NIC-960209.1757] Routing Problem (fwd)

  • From: Jonathan Heiliger
  • Date: Tue Feb 13 20:52:05 1996

On Tue, 13 Feb 1996, Simon Chan wrote:

> 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.

I don't believe it requires "pure luck."  I would hope that a group of
individuals would be able to convince the InterNIC into delegating a /16,
in return for either an equal amount of smaller CIDR blocks or somewhere
in the neighborhood.  If some of those smaller delegations happened to be
continguous, the InterNIC would then have the responsibility and option of
turning them into a larger block or simply re-delegating them out to new
organizations at their discretion.

Small providers are the ones that tend to have the smaller CIDR blocks
(/18 and above).  If a number of these organizations were to "join" 
together using an exchange point mechanism, with multiple long-haul
carriers connecting (e.g. NSPs) to a single point, you could achieve a
good level of aggregation. 

For example, rather than the "Internet," having to deal with 8, /19
announcements, the rest of the world would see a single /16 announcement. 

Wow, so we just do this in a few hundred places and you've lowered the
overall routing table by 8 * N(hundred).  The main problem, as we all
know, is this isn't a stable marketplace.  Not only is there fierce
competition for staff, but also for customers.  Why would a number of
small providers want join together? 


-jh-