[ppml] 2005-1:Business Need for PI Assignments

[Michael.Dillon at radianz.com]

> Yes we are bad predictors of the future, but we
> had the foresight to not allocate the entire space up front. We are 
working
> with 1/8 of the space right now, so if the current policies prove to be
> insufficient over the next 50 years we have the opportunity to start 
over a
> few more times which should get us well beyond 100 years.

> If on the other hand we defined the routing system to also allow 
regionally
> valid PI space with strict aggregation between regions, we would 
alleviate
> the majority of the issue about switching providers by allowing everyone 
to
> have PI space while containing the swamp explicit routing entries to
> whatever scale seemed technically appropriate. This could be done 
through
> geo-political approaches like country-code/city-code, or devoid of 
political
> context using strict geographic allocations.

In the end, I think that strict geographic allocations which
follow the topology of the network, are the only workable solution.
However, in order to make this work, we need some solid analysis
of demand distribution (current and potential) in order to design
the distribution of these geographical addresses. And we also need
people to recognize that this is not about drawing boundaries. A
network topology doesn't have boundaries, it has centers of
connectedness that are the equivalent of real-world cities and 
towns.

Since we do have the space available to do geographic addressing
by using another 1/8th of the IPv6 address space, why are we not
seriously pursuing this avenue? I know that geopolitical addressing
is sexier, i.e. the same old, same old, but if we had some serious
work being done on geographical addressing that would be sufficient
to push the geopolitical ideas to the bottom of the agenda.

> The RIR model is biased toward keeping the
> ISP membership happy (because that group tends to speak with a more 
unified
> voice), and therefore naturally leans toward minimizing the cost in the
> routing part of the problem.

The RIR model is also a form of ad-hoc geographical addressing.
Unfortunately, the RIR model does not follow through with the
details required to make geographical addressing work at all
levels of the network.

--Michael Dillon