[ppml] geo addressing

[Rich Emmings]

The horse has left the morticians for the glue factory.

Anyone looked at any traceroutes lately?  I've gone from Boston to Boston 
via Chicago and actually improved performance once with a congestion 
sensitive application by forcing a reroute via Los Angeles.  That's a 
function of where the fiber got laid, and the path purchased not where the 
people are.  This won't change due to addressing.

Anyone tunneled or multihomed lately?  Certainly possible for an org to 
announce the same prefix in two cities far apart.  I know one org that does 
it 90 miles apart, which is probably trivial in terms of distance, but a 
model proposing different supernets for 2 areas would require NAT or fail 
(but I repeat myself.)  These are regional examples, but some proposals were
down the city-regional level, and would have broken here.

Anyone remember LATA's?  Toll bypass? Various new telco products and VoIP 
offerings have made area codes and even exchanges less reliable as a 
geolocation tool.  (201 was NYC, 202 LA; if the system was geo hierarchical, 
the east might have been 2 and the west 9 with others in the middle.  It's a 
non-hierarchical system which happened to correlation geographically. 
Compare the US Postal code system, which has hierarchy @ 3, 5 and 9 digits, 
and like the early area code system, run by one org with an iron fist for 
their internal use.)

Looking at IP in IP (MPLS, VPNs etc) and private fiber (Google today, 
someone else tomorrow), suggest that things are growing in way counter to 
geographic organization.  Addresses could legitimately pop up all over the 
place, not unlike cell phone numbers, which require a database to track 
that.  But your cell phone's serial number doesn't change when you fly from 
NYC to LA.


An IP address is just an address and nothing more.


Let Dobbin rest in peace....