North American Network Operators Group

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Re: IPv8 < IPv6

  • From: Alan Hannan
  • Date: Thu Nov 06 17:28:37 1997

  Paul,

> Duh.

  You won't mind if I quote you, here?  ;-)

> And geography is *not* important. I can show you several
> organizational networks located in one country, with their
> principle Internet connectivity located in another country
> entirely. Geographic location means absolutely nothing.
> 
> It is where they connect in the global hierarchy.

  This is true [at the interprovider level].  Today.  However, as
  deregulation continues [like a freight train with constant
  acceleration] what will incentivize "organizational networks" to
  maintain these geographically disparate connections?

  When Internet demand continues, and more fiber is run, and
  competitive LEC and IXCs develop in europe, pacrim, and africa,
  the infrastructure will increase, and these distant connections
  will become financially prohibitive.*

  The market will make topology follow geography.  But not for a
  while.  The next interesting model to study is that of ubiquitous
  banwidth.  With this model geography will have no bearing on
  topology.  

  So I see three phases of bandwidth growth, with corresponding
  effects on the correlation:

	Time		Bandwidth			Correlation
	---------	-----------------------		------------
  	Today		Consolidated Bandwidth		Low
	Soon		Available Bandwidth		High
	Someday		Oversupply of Bandwidth		Low

   With an oversupply of bandwidth (like we had w/ long distance
   providers in the mid to late 80s) backhauling traffic is
   cost-effective allowing a noncommodity based market to emerge.

   When South African ISPs can interconnect to a continental operating
   company/network ina cost effective manner, we can be they'll do
   so.  And this is the trend I envision towards correlating
   topology and geography.  

   -alan

* the key premise I'm making here is that as the value of a local
  connection increases, geography and topology will converge.  As
  the value of such decreases, they will diverge.  The value is a
  function of the benefit [gained by local content and useful
  aggregation towars the content [like caches, and large networks
  building pipes to far-away places, and gaining nice aggregation]]
  and the cost. 

  The cost is going down as competition increases.  The benefit is
  going up as interesting technologies grow, and providers build
  larger international networks.