[ppml] geo addressing

[Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com]

> Okay, pretty clear answers.  Do I have it right that ARIN
> would reserve, say, a /32 for NY, with a dotted line around
> a map, then any ISP who applied for address space would get
> an allocation from that /32?  ISPs would have to apply for
> separate blocks in each gerrymander; local ISPs and IXen
> would have portable blocks from their local /32?

More or less. First of all, I would not draw borders around
areas on a map. I would allocate addresses to ISPs who 
will interconnect within the existing boundaries of the
city of New York, but I would expect that those ISPs 
will serve customers in the surrounding area as well
as the city itself. In that surrounding area, it will be
up to the customers to decide whether they connect to 
an NYC based ISP or a Syracuse based ISP or a Rochester
based ISP. The actual boundaries will be fuzzy.

ISPs would be able to ask for a geotopological allocation
or a "classic" allocation or some of both. Local ISPs 
would be able to get portable allocations of any size
from their local reservation. Of course, they are only
portable within that city. Companies can do the same.
Presumably, someday a multihomed company will move their
factory Poughkeepsie to Utica and will decide to 
longline their network connection back to the New York
area in order to avoid renumbering into Rochester 
addresses. That is entirely up to them since the 
geotopological address allocation is based on the 
center of interconnection, not the physical location.
If the American embassy in Moscow wants to use addresses
out of the Washington DC reservation then they can do
that as long as they tunnel back to DC to interconnect.

I'm not proposing lots and lots of strict rules,
just a separate paradigm for addressing, interconnect
and peering that focuses on the world's 5,000 largest
cities with population of 100,000 or greater. These 
are the nodes in the Internet because the vast majority
of the fiber in place, interconnects these cities.
That is the geographical topology that I want to
match the addressing to.

> > All of this is IPv6 because that is where th big block of
> > unspecified address space exists. It does mean that in
> > geotopological addressing we come back to the idea of
> > allocating to ISPs only as many addresses as they can
> > justify. No /32s. However, the /48 and /64 rules continue
> > to apply because end-user networks are still the same.
> 
> Justify = 6-month projected host count?  10 year?

That is up to policy. But these geo-topological addresses
do bring us back to the IPv4 concept of justifying the size
of the ISP's allocation. Also, this justification happens in
the context of a single local area which means it is much
smaller than the "classic" IPv6 address space and it is
limited. Therefore, I think 10 years is way too much.
A 6-month projection is reasonable as a minimum but I would
prefer to see 12 months. This forces companies to make an
annual review of their situation which is reasonable because
it ties in with budgetting cycles. I think that along with
the one year projection justifying the allocation, it would
be good to see a 3 year projection as well. I would also
expect that the current algorithm used for carving up the
IPv4 space would be good to use in each geo-topological area.

--Michael Dillon