The proper solution is for all these companies to form a consortium. The
consortium would run the NAP and contract with multiple NSP's for
service. In that case, the NSP's are not providing transit to
non-customers because the consortium is the customer and every ISP who
joins the consortium gets multihoming reliability outside the region.
Ah - we may have something that works - we have someone (the
consortium) being paid (by these companies) to provide (or further
purchase) transit.
However I'm not sure how this works of one (or more) of these companies
decides to buy or provide transit on their own (outside of the
consortium).
Lets pick a company (call it X) that decides to do this. Now X's
routes have to be known outside of the consortium's aggregate (since X
is providing its own global transit and since X does not want to give
free transit to the entire aggregate).
Humm - this does not seem to scale.
I suppose that if you find a set of companies that are all willing to
be part of the consortium & just part of the consortium, then you could
do addressing for this consortium as a whole. Hey! I think that we
just invented provider (consortium) based addressing again.
Depends on your definition of provider. I'm just saying that there
appears to be room for another tier of provider in between the local ISP's
and the national/global NSP's. NAP's and exchange points are popping up
all over the place these days; it is only a small extension of the
exchange point concept to a business that provides city-wide backbones
(or meshes).
It won't work everywhere, but it will work in some places and it will
help control the growth of routes and that is good.
(Sending only to nanog, as per the recent coin-toss decision.)
From: Andrew Partan <asp@uunet.uu.net>
I suppose that if you find a set of companies that are all willing to
be part of the consortium & just part of the consortium, then you could
do addressing for this consortium as a whole. Hey! I think that we
just invented provider (consortium) based addressing again.
One can also play tricks with tunnels, so that the folk with long prefixes
inside the consortium's aggregate can get to the consortium without
anything else needing to know a route for the long prefix.
The packets travel farther (from source to consortium, and then from
consortium to destination via the tunnel), but that's OK, because both the
destination and the consortium are paying.