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Re: a radical proposal (Re: protocols that don't meet the need...)

  • From: Mike Leber
  • Date: Thu Feb 16 00:05:50 2006

On Wed, 15 Feb 2006, Joe Provo wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 15, 2006 at 06:51:16PM -0800, John A. Kilpatrick wrote:
> > On Thu, 16 Feb 2006, Edward B. DREGER wrote:
> > 
> > >Stop.  Examine.  Think.  Then respond.
> 
> Something about history repeating applies. those who weren't around 
> then should re-visit tli's ISPAC proposal from 96 and the associated
> discussion on both nanog and cidrd archives before regurgitating it.
> 
> Flatly, there are economic pressures to carry deaggregates and they
> have undermined/reversed the progress from cidr.   Solve that 
> [approaches other than longest-match always wins] or else yes the 
> issue will carry to v6.  This is one aspect of the "get ietf to 
> re-examine routing" folks at the sessions were on about.   Then we
> get back to "the ietf is composed of vendors who want to see your 
> capital dollars on a recurring basis" sub-topic...

In line with this... (I had to point this out in a different context on
another list before):

Networks announce prefixes because doing so makes them money.  Networks
that listen to these prefixes do so because that makes them money.

In light of this, the current size of the routing table is a function of
the number of businesses or organizations that would like to multihome
limited to those that can afford to pay for the capital costs of a router
capable of doing BGP, the operational cost of maintaining it, and the
service cost of buying Internet connectivity that includes BGP sessions
with their transit providers.

Where ever you see that function trending is how big you can expect the
routing table to become because of economic pressure.

While there are not as many businesses and organizations as people on the
planet, as an exercise imagine 4 billion prefixes.

For the sake of simplicity assume a 32 bit forwarding tables (4 billion
entries) for each interface on a router expandable to 256 interfaces, with
a byte (256 possible forwarding destinations) per entry for forwarding (4
GB of RAM).  Such a thing could be made now and would attribute to a very
small fraction of the cost we currently pay for new Cisco cards.  You
might not get as good port density for the physical form factor, however
it is doable now.

This is separate from the convergence discussion for 4 billion prefixes,
etc etc etc.  The link speed required to be able to converge within a
minute is left to the reader.  heh.  :)

Mike.

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