[ppml] 2005-1 or its logical successor

[Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com]

> Eventually the 'regional' IXP would have to become a County IXP then a
> City IXP then Town IXP, proliferating the number of IXP's to a very
> large number (how many towns exist in the USA alone? Does this really
> drop the DFZ table that much?

According to UN statistics there are about 5,000 cities
in the world with population of 100,000 or greater. We already
have geo addressing at the RIR level, more or less. I think
we either need to pick a city size, like 100,000, as the next
level of aggregation or, possibly, pick one level in between.
This would mean that any smaller towns need to join in the
aggregate for the nearest (or dearest) town of 100,000 
or greater. At the regional level I can see North America
being split into eastern and western regions. Possibly
there could be a central region as well and if you include
Canada in your thinking, I would also see a north/south split
with the dividing line running somewhere south of DC, 
south of Kansas City, and south of Portland.

If anyone is serious about doing work on where the
natural regional groupings are for North America
I would recommend looking at Telegeography's data
and also I would recommend studying freight dispatching
systems which have also divided North America into
dispatch zones.

State boundaries and LATAs are too small for this
exercise. We don't really need to aggregate cities
into more than half a dozen regions or so, per
continent.

> Additionally, the DFZ folks now become the 'LD carrier' of the
> Internet and since they don't have direct customers they arrange
> 'settlement' with the IXPs I suppose? I'm not sure this gets us to the
> end goal either.

What is the difference between settlement and transit?
Settlement and paid peering? Maybe it is just terminology.

> How is a local IXP 'multihoming' me? it's getting me a connection to a
> single 'carrier' with lots of bgp options... or I'm again confused.

There is no single model for this. Maybe the IXP sells you Internet
access circuits with no ISP at the other end. Then you buy a 
cross connect from one of the ISPs at the IXP. If you want to
you can buy multiple access circuits, and then buy your cross
connects from separate ISPs. I believe Savvis started out in life
with a very similar model.

> It
> may get me more than one pipe to the IXP and more bgp options on each,
> and now the IXP-truck-bomb is my failure scenario (and much easier I'd
> think).

Even in a city with 100,000 people, I believe that there should
be a minimum of 3 IXP locations or 3 separate IXPs. That is
the architecture for the 22nd century and that is the goal 
which we should be striving towards. If enough people understand
the implications of single points of failure in a world where 
everything happens on the network then customers will demand
this and ISPs/IXPs will build this.

I realize that today, there is not a universal business case
for building that kind of architecture, especially within a
single company. But when making policy we must look at the
larger picture which includes corporate evolution and industry
evolution as well.

--Michael Dillon