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Re: who gets a /32 [Re: IPV6 renumbering painless?]

  • From: Michael.Dillon
  • Date: Mon Nov 22 06:34:28 2004

> Not necessarily true.  I live in California.  However, 703-842-5527 is a
> valid phone number for me.  It even worked for me while I was in Puerto
> Vallarta, Mexico.  I can take that number pretty much any where in the
> world, whether temporarily, or, even if I move there. 

This isn't just a US phenomenon. Companies like 
http://www.telphin.com/numbers.php
are selling this kind of number portability in other countries.
And I remember some Australians were routing US phone numbers
to their mobiles back in 1997.

Clearly, telephone numbers are now being treated as
names rather than addresses. The technical issues
we should be concerned with are down at the address
level. Could continental aggregation be a way of
reducing the size of the so-called global routing
table so that the table can accomodate a larger number
of specifics within the continent?

Alex Bligh raised the spectre of GRE tunnels to
redirect traffic to the right location. Could this
be done by simply readdressing the packets? Is this
even relevant in a world that runs IPv4 and IPv6
over MPLS? After all MPLS is designed to swap and
pop destination labels to route and reroute packets
through the network.

In a real-world network perhaps we should accept
that some problems will be solved outside of 
IPv6.

--Michael Dillon