Sue:
Lots of companies require electricity and phone service in order to conduct
their business. Given the comparatively small number of companies that have
phone lines served by more than one central office or redundant power feeds to
their buildings (much less lines provided by more than one phone company or
more than one power company), I little evidence to suggest that there will be
a huge growth in the number of multi-homed networks in the near future.
Your last paragraph is most telling, however. We are looking at this
situation from two different angles. While you are designing the next
generation of routing protocols, my compatriots and I are discussing how to
reasonably configure the hardware we've already got with existing protocols in
order to keep the poor CPUs in boxes that carry full routing from melting down
due to route flap. Neither task is inherently better or more honorable than
the other, but it is important to not let the purposes become crossed. When
the futurists are permitted to interfere with the here-and-now pragmatists,
what happens is called OSI. When you let the here-and-now pragmatists
interfere with the vision of the futurists, you get the phone company and
cable TV.
I am quite interested to see a copy of your paper; please send it (or a
pointer) along. IDRP may be wonderful, but it is not likely to make the CPUs
in ICM's routers sit down and take a rest in the near term. Pull-up routes to
reduce flap are a cheap, easy-to-install, and rapidly deployable (though not
technologically beautiful) way to do that, and should be deployed with all
reasonable haste (in my biased opinion).
Best regards,
---Rob