[ppml] geo addressing

[Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com]

> 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.

Geotopological addressing is not a traffic engineering tool.
It does not pretend to solve all corner cases in Internet
operations or architecture. What it does do is allow a much
larger number of organizations to multihome in their 
city without consuming slots in the global routing table.
Therefore it helps you reroute traffic via Chicago and LA
because there will be more space in the global routing table
for those more-specifics.

> 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.

Geotopological addressing is not 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. 

This was done on purpose. The feeling was that people would make
less dialling mistakes if the similar area codes were far apart
geographically.

> An IP address is just an address and nothing more.

That has not been true since people began filtering on different
prefix lengths in different address ranges. Around the time CIDR
was invented.

Geotopological addressing is not proposed as a replacement for
the classic IPv6 address allocation plan. It is proposed as an
additional addressing plan with different rules which runs
alongside the classic plan and offers organizations a choice.
In effect, it brings market principles to bear in RIR policy
by making classic addressing compete with geotopological addressing.

--Michael Dillon