Reply to MCI question

[Tim Bass]

It is nice to know, BTW, that MCI has such a reasonable policy.

Providers who force subproviders to use non-portable address
space create a non-competitive business climate and to do so
for the sake of making route forwarding tables as small as
possible are asking for trouble in the future.

Firms, like MCI, who understand this and try to work a balanced
approach, are quite ethical in their approach and should be
praised.  If we recall the early days of MCI, they were forced
to unlease a series of lawsuits in Federal Court to force
the big provider to allow them to compete and to have equal access.

Vendors, such as cisco, with spokesmen like Paul Ferguson, who 
should state 'all providers must get address from upstream providers'
do so because they do not understand competiveness issues, as
MCI does.  Traditionally, cisco has had the excellent position
of being the 'only real kid on the routing block' so, the can
dictate, mandate, and direct.

It will not be long into the future, a new routing protocol will
be introduced, which will make provider based, non-portable 
address space obsolete.  And, more than likely, it will be
necessary for someone to go to court, similar to the olds
days of MCI, to force the industry to implement this new
paradigm, for foster competitiveness in the industry.

It was good to hear from MCI, a policy, which is not perfect,
but is a compromise between competitiveness and the reality 
of current scalability problems.   I wanted to react strongly,
a few days ago, to Mr. Ferguson's (representing cisco Systems?)
demand all ISP get address space from providers.  However,
I did not, and deleted a very harsh censure of his statement.
It is just not worth the energy to debate with individuals
with very narrow perspectives on very broad issues.  

Albert Einstein once said, to the effect:

"A new idea which is not judged by your peers as insane cannot
 be a profound discovery".

I wish Albert could return from his place of repose to watch
the reactions to those who know and understand, a better
inter-domain routing protocol is on the horizon.


Best Regards,

Tim




> 
> I'll just take one second to clarify MCI's position.
> If your request is for address space equal to a /18 or more than we refer
> you to the InterNic since our addresses are non-portable and also in
> following Kim's recommendations and RFC 2050. If it is less and you have
> justified your request and you are also following "slow start" IAW RFC
> 2050 then we have no problems allocating address space to any of our
> customers. Thank you.
> 
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
> |  John Sweeting               Internet Address Engineering   |
> |  Enginer III                 Internet:  sweeting at mci.net    |
> |  MCI Internet Services            http://infopage.mci.net   |
> |  4408 Silicon Drive, P.O. Box 14901, RTP, NC 27709          |
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
> 
>