North American Network Operators Group
Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: Cost per prefix [was: request for help w/ ATT and terminology]

  • From: Patrick W. Gilmore
  • Date: Sun Jan 20 10:13:52 2008

Ben,

I believe you are correct that PA deaggregation is a huge problem, but some of that could be corporate multi-homing. (I don't know for certain whether it is greater or less than providers just being ninnies.) Lots of companies get a /24 from one upstream and announce it to two or more upstreams. That is, IMHO, a legitimate deaggregation, as opposed to a provider who is just too clueless aggregate.


But before we go too far down this road, everyone here should realize that new PI space and PA deaggregation WILL CONTINUE TO HAPPEN.

Many corporations paying for Internet access will NOT be tied to a single provider. Period. Trying to tell them "you are too small, you should only let us big networks have our own space" is a silly argument which won't fly.

The Internet is a business tool. Trying to make that tool less flexible, trying to tie the fate of a customer to the fate of a single provider, or trying force them to jump through more hoops than you have to jump through for the same redundancy / reliability is simply not realistic. And telling them it will cost some random network in some random other place a dollar a year for their additional flexibility / reliability / performance is not going to convince them not to do it.

The number of these coAt least not while the Internet is still driven by commercial realities. (Which I personally think is a Very Good Thing - much better than the alternative.) Someone will take the customer's check, so the prefix will be in the table. And since you want to take your customers' checks to provide access to that ISP's customer, you will have to carry the prefix.


Of course, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be thrifty with table space. We just have to stop thinking that only the largest providers should be allowed to add a prefix to the table. At least if we are going to continue making money on the Internet.

--
TTFN,
patrick



On Jan 20, 2008, at 7:08 AM, Ben Butler wrote:


Hi,

Out of curiosity was the reasoning also to charge the PA who are
deagregating?

To restate there are 113,220 extra routes smaller than RIR minimums out
of the /24:126,450 in the table. The today reality seems to be that
113K of that 126K is probably being caused by existing networks
de-aggregating PA.

While I would I would agree that corporate multihoming with PI has a
huge potential problem on the table in terms of number of prefixes.
Further more as BGP skills are becoming more common place and
Linux/Quagga skills the barrier to entry for a corporate is reducing at
the same time their commercial reliance on and use of the Internet is
increasing.

Corporate multihoming - if permitted - has the inevitable consequence of
an extra prefix.

PA deagreagtion - has the avoidable consequence of lots of extra
prefixes.

I know who I would be charging first and maybe it would give the much
need incentive for them to clean house. We could then have some number
up to 113K new multihomed corporate before we got back to where we are
today in terms of route table size. An interesting question to gauge
the size of the corporate multihoming potential problem is to guess how
many there may be worldwide that would bother / try - I have no idea.

I believe (possibly wrongly) that IPv6 doesn't really have a solution
for multihoming corporate with multiple allocations and weird shims and
NAT configurations to get it to work - or have the RIRs decided on a
policy change yet and issuing PI blocks of IPv6 as well?

Am I correct on my interpretation of the numbers for PA:PI smaller
prefix origins?

Kind Regards

Ben

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of
William Herrin
Sent: 20 January 2008 11:06
To: Patrick W. Gilmore
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Cost per prefix [was: request for help w/ ATT and
terminology]


On Jan 19, 2008 11:43 PM, Patrick W. Gilmore <[email protected]> wrote:
On Jan 19, 2008, at 12:55 PM, William Herrin wrote: 
There was some related work on ARIN PPML last year. The rough
numbers suggested that the attributable economic cost of one IPv4
prefix in the DFZ (whether PI, PA or TE) was then in the
neighborhood of $8000 USD per year.

I haven't seen that work, but I am guessing this number is an
aggregate (i.e. every cost to everyone on the 'Net combined), not per- 

network? See, I'm just looking at that TWO BILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR
number and thinking to myself, "um, yeah, right". :)

Patrick,

That was a worldwide total, yes. The cost per prefix per router is
obviously only measured in cents per year.

You do know that Cisco's sales are north of $20B per year, right?
Juniper, which sells few products that aren't DFZ routers, also posts
annual revenues well north of $1B.


Feel free to explain how confused I am.  (But be warned, I am not
going to believe it costs $2B/year to run a multi-homed network with
two full feeds. :)

The thread started here:
http://lists.arin.net/pipermail/ppml/2007-September/008927.html
It was originally an argument of about the cost of doing PI for IPv6,
which according to Cisco product literature consumes twice the amount of
space in the FIB as routes for IPv4.

I encourage you to critique the numbers and then add them up for
yourself.

Regards,
Bill Herrin


--
William D. Herrin                  [email protected]  [email protected]
3005 Crane Dr.                        Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
Falls Church, VA 22042-3004