[ppml] Fw: IRS goes IPv6!

[Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com]

> Perhaps the market will decide differently a few years from now, if
> or when routing tables become more bloated than then-prevalent
> hardware can handle. Again, ignoring the religious aspect of 
> protocol design, if my business is perfectly happy with the idea
> that IPv4 or IPv6 or IPv8 packets cannot reach us from, say, China,
> and our packets cannot get there, will there be a viable business
> model and - perhaps more importantly - address assignment policies
> allowing the providing of that sort of connectivity?
> 
> The instant question, I think, is should today's allocation policy
> proceed on the assumption that every packet will have to be
> able to reach every destination forever? Or can it say these 
> ranges, or these sizes, may have a problem 5 years from now,
> caveat emptor? Isn't ARIN already telling ISP's what to do?

Who says that routing tables have to be stored in routers?

There was a time, when the diameter of the Internet was
quite a bit larger than 30 hops. This created a problem 
because people in the periphery could not make IP connections
to distant sites. However, there was still a way to send
email. I remember helping a researcher in Peru contact a 
colleague in the Ukraine by sending email to
colleague%university.ua at aol.com. The mail server at
aol.com, relayed the message onward to colleague at university.ua.
This worked because AOL was near the center of the Internet
in terms of hopcount. And because spam was a problem that
only bothered USENET users.

Why couldn't we do something similar with IP. An ISP could
contract with a provider near the center of the Internet
to deliver any packets that they don't know how to deliver.
These central providers have humungous routing tables, perhaps
stored on servers, not routers, and can handle every single
PI route known to man. This is another way that business
negotiations and creative use of existing technology could
sidestep the problem of mushrooming route tables. Instead
of upgrading every router in your network, you outsource
some packet delivery to a specialist. This specialist, 
knowing that your packets are not to well-known destinations,
can process them through servers containing much larger
amounts of memory than a typical core router. The main packet
volume goes to well-known destinations, thus these proxy
shunts need not carry the same traffic levels as a core router.

I simply do not believe that giving out PI space creates
an insurmountable problem. Instead it creates opportunities
for new business models. It stimulates the industry rather
than restraining trade. 

--Michael Dillon