[ppml] geo addressing

[Michel Py]

Michael,

> Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com wrote:
>[ppml] geo addressing

Disclaimer: please understand that I'm not trying to rain on your parade
and read the following as friendly feedback from someone who's been on
that road before.

We have been working on geo addressing for IPv6 since 1995. That's over
10 years.
http://arneill-py.sacramento.ca.us/ipv6mh/metro-addr-slides-jul95.pdf
Look who wrote it, too.

Since then, lots of people including myself have worked on it, with
sometimes significant amounts of research such as having a database of
all the cities in the world:
http://arneill-py.sacramento.ca.us/ipv6mh/geov6.txt
And other nice methods by many other persons.

Out of these people, many were bright, hard-working, politically
well-connected in the IPv6 IETF and other communities, and had large
vendor resources behind them.

You're flogging a dead horse.

The last round of discussions I remember being involved in, we
approached the issue not as "why geo addressing" but as "why not geo
addressing". The main argument was: even if we don't aggregate geo
addresses, they are not worse than randomly assign prefixes, so why not
go to geo addresses and figure out later if we can aggregate them. If we
can, good; if we can't, oh well nice try no cigar and we're not worse
off than if we had flat space anyway.

Trouble is: it does not fly for two reasons:
1. Politics: any geo addressing scheme involves tons of political
horseshit.
2. Uncertainty: place yourself in the position of a network
administrator of a growing company; why risk going to geo addresses not
knowing if the aggregation mechanism will fit your needs? Way too risky.

Michel.