This has probably been thought of before, or discussed on some other list,
and if so I apologize in advance.
I've formed an intuition that, if all IP addresses were portable (ie.
independent of ISP) and assigned on a strictly geographic basis, then
there would *automatically* be clustering of addresses equivalent to
that obtained from CIDRization as a result of marketplace forces and
the practicalities of technology.
Note that this results from the address being, not the property of the
ISP or the end user, but rather of a geographic location. In other words
under my scheme if I picked up and moved a hundred miles I'd have to
renumber, but if I just switched ISPs I wouldn't.
-- Walt
The problem is that once you assign a group of IP numbers to a geographic
region, and they're being used, then what happens with population shifts?
For instance, let's say one county in South Dakota gets maybe a /22
block, and Silicon Valley gets a /6 block. What happens (hypothetically,
of course) if all of South Dakota all of the sudden begins growing as a
techology center? After you're out of address space, you're out... =)
With IPng, assignment would be better possible, but right now, anything
close is just improbable.
/cah
This is akin to the DNIC (X.121)addressing scheme used in X.25
networks. The first few octets of the address specified the continent,
backbone network on that continent, and geographic region (area code).
This sure made routing very easy as the address contained intelligance
rather than just a mish-mash of numbers. Routing is accomplished by the
first few octets *only* untill the packet arrived within its destination
area code, then full address routing would take place.
--- Jay Nugent