[ppml] Policy Proposal 2005-9: 4-Byte AS Number

[Rich Emmings]

I'm in concurrance with this:

On Wed, 21 Dec 2005, Marshall Eubanks wrote:

> - We can live with expressing 5 digit ASN's as simple decimal
> numbers. The existence proof for that is that we do.
> I see no reason to worry about adding a digit to that, and I can
> certainly live with 6 digit decimal numbers.
>

IP addresses in aggregate express a hierarchy.  AS numbers do not.

2 byte ASN's 0 - 65535 unsigned, and 4 byte are 65536-4294967295.  ASN 
1,000,000 would mean the AS space has grown an additional ~15 times the 
existing space.

Most of us can deal with with 7 digit phone numbers.  I leave it to someone 
else to figure out the burn rate of ASN's but it'll probably take double 
digit years to reach 100,000, least of all > 7 digit ASNs.

The router shouldn't have a problem figuring this out either, when it can 
support 32 bits in the ASN bucket, it can just zero the field and stuff the 
ASN in there, and it doesn't matter if it's 16 or 32 bits.

KISS applies here.