[ppml] Provider Independence???

[Michael.Dillon at radianz.com]

> The fundamental flaw with the theory of geographical aggregation is that
> it would need a form of provider transit love-fest to become feasible 
that
> simply isn't the reality of today's market conditions. 

That's a big mouthful.

Love-fest is not a network technical term so I have
no idea what you are driving at. Clearly, providers
do currently interconnect through private peering and
through exchange points. There is no single model for
how these interconnects are organized and managed. I see
no reason to assume that all providers would reject
routing addresses that require them to have peering
connections with their local competitors since many
of them already have such peering connections to reduce
their costs.

Secondly, the reality of today's market conditions is
not equivalent in all regions of North America or in all
regions of the world. One could reasonably assume that at
any given point of time, some region somewhere is in
recession. This is not a good reason to not do geographic
addressing. 

>Today, you would
> need to get all the major providers in every region to agree to provide
> some form of transit for lots of people that aren't paying them to talk
> to lots of other people that aren't paying them.  I just don't see that
> as being likely to happen.

I have no idea what you are talking about. This sounds like
you are taking the position of the big five networks circa 1994
who were trying to prevent their customers from selling connectivity
to downstream ISPs. The market has worked out this problem.
We have lots of paths with greater than 2 ASNs in them.
Geographic addressing doesn't change this in any way.

--Michael Dillon