[ppml] Provider Independence???

[Michael.Dillon at radianz.com]

> At the end of the day, this means that 
> ISPA will be carrying traffic for some of the customers of ISPB, which 
> i guess lacks of a business case.

Please remember that we are talking about IPv6 here
not IPv4. In other words we are talking about a network
which does not currently exist. There is no reason why
it has to be deployed identically to v4 with just a 
different layer 3 protocol. It will likely be different
in many ways, depending on what applications it is
built to support.

I can envision ISPA operating in 3 regions with
4 ASNs, 1 for each region and one for their non-geographic
network. They would only announce the geo aggregate for
region 1 using their region 1 AS. This means that they
will only be carrying some of ISPBs traffic if that traffic
is destined to region 1. Since both ISPs operate in region 1
they will have some sort of peering agreement at region 1
exchange points. Otherwise the traffic would never get to 
it's destination in ISPB's network and ISPA would also 
lose traffic that comes in on ISPB's regional links.

So the business case is clear, as it was back in the 
early 90's. Everybody needs to carry competitor's 
traffic in order to create the "network effect" which
makes the network valuable to customers. And any
imbalances are worked out in peering and transit agreements.

In fact, I think the real leaders in this will
not be the ISPs but the exchange points, especially
the larger operations like Equinix. If geo addressing
is accepted in v6, then this allows for the v6 network
to be built as a network of exchange points. I believe
that this will provide better resiliency and seperacy
than v6 networks and that, in the end, will drive the
mass migration to v6 networks.

--Michael Dillon