North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: IPv6 news

  • From: Michael.Dillon
  • Date: Mon Oct 17 06:39:25 2005

> Another alternative is to force-align allocation and topology in some 
> way /other/ than by "Providers" (geographical allocation in whatever 
> hierarchy, IX allocation, whatever), such that networks were easily 
> aggregatable. Lots of objections though (the "providers and geography 
> don't align" one though is ultimately slightly bogus, because with 
> non-provider-aligned allocation policies in place it would be in 
> providers interests to align their peering to match the allocation 
> policy).

I think we need a researcher to sit down and 
figure out exactly what this would look like
in a sample city and a sample national provider.

This is one of those inversion situations where
we are turning the existing model inside out. Some
people may be familiar with the inversion of 
control in user interfaces that came about when
Windows/Macintosh became the standard UI.

Here, the suggestion is that netblocks should
be allocated to cities, not to providers. Within
a city, providers would get a subset of the city
address block to meet their local infrastructure
needs. They would interconnect with each other
a local exchange points to exchange local traffic
as Paul Vixie is suggesting here:
http://news.com.com/5208-1028-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=10554&messageID=77189&start=-1

Addresses from other cities would be viewed as
a single aggregate for that city and these could
be even further aggregated at some regional level
such as Northwest, Southwest, Midwest, Southeast
and Northeast.

It's different than what we have now, but not
extremely different. It is doable with IPv6 without
any protocol changes because there is sufficient
reserve address space available. It meets the concept
of Internet as utility or mission-critical Internet
because it mandates local interconnect. The customer
point of view is that low latency and consistent
latency is best and that mandates local interconnect.

--Michael Dillon