North American Network Operators Group

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Sensible geographical addressing [Was: 16 vs 32 bit ASNs yadda, yadda]

  • From: Michael.Dillon
  • Date: Tue Nov 30 09:28:54 2004

> This is broken by design.  What would have happend if this
> had be done before the fiber glut in the late 90's?  As far
> as I am aware a couple of new fiber routes have been build
> and a few more cities have become nodes.

I am not suggesting time machines. I am proposing that
this be done now, after the fiber glut has largely been
built out and when we are in a much better position to
understand how the global network will evolve. That's
why I suggest that the planning for the aggregation 
hierarchy should be done in the regions. They know
more about the topology of their region and the
pressures (economic, political, social) that will
drive the evolution of the network in their region.

> Anything that takes geography into the routing is plain and
> simple broken.

Then why do major American providers require peers 
to be in 16 or more geographic locations? Why do
people aggregate addresses geographically in their
networks? It can't all be broken.

> Today you hop on a plane and fly directly and non-stop from
> Geneva Airport to Chicago O'Hare.  And it takes only 12 hours
> instead of one to two weeks.

Good example of geographical routing. Anyone near Chicago who
wants to travel to Territet or Fribourg or Dijon doesn't need 
to know anything more than it is near Geneva. The national
border between Switzerland and France is irrelevant since
it is easier to get to Dijon France via Geneva than via
Paris. However, if you make a mistake and go to Paris instead,
it's not so bad, just a few extra hours. That's an 
example of best effort routing.

> Not
> that this is unimportant but it's no longer where people go or
> come by.

Technically speaking, I don't care about where people go or
where containers go. It's the fiber routes that I care about
and these usually lead to interconnect points or exchanges
in the major cities. I worked for GTS at the time they
were building Flag Atlantic. Even though we knew that the
cables landed at Crab Meadow and Long Beach, we still 
referred to that end as the New York end because we 
were only planning to connect customers to the link
in the city of New York. On a trans-oceanic hop it
doesn't make a lot of difference if the traffic lands
in a Sprint Pop and then has to go crosstown to 
MCI's PoP before being routed to its destination in
Rochester. Why do the Europeans need to see the
topology of New York State in order to efficiently
route traffic?

10 years ago we didn't have the RIR system in
place to help us with geographic addressing. Today
we do. Now you might be able to convince me that 
we could achieve similar goals by putting together
route registries, RIRs and some magic pixie dust.
As far as I'm concerned, geographical route aggregation
is necessary for the v6 network to scale. It will
happen, the only question is how we solve the problem.

We won't solve it by badmouthing ULAs or SCTP
or Multi6 or 32 bit ASes. The problems are real
and the demand for workable solutions is real.
Note the plural on the word "solutions".

--Michael Dillon