Not that I am advocating that the government should mandate
something like IP portability, but if they did, it could force
a sufficient rethink so that routing actually becomes much
more scaleable because routing is forced to work based
upon physical location.
Look at how local number portability (LNP) works. Before
the phone call is connected, a translation is made between
the logical number and the actual number. The actual
number is based upon geography, and consists of
country-code, area-code, local exchange, and then
physical port number. As a result, the routing tables
in telephone networks are small. For example, if you
are in the US and need to call the UK, the network
only needs one entry for all telephone networks in
the UK (plus a few more for redundancy).
This is quite a contrast to how IP addresses have been
allocated. And therefore, we have 96K and counting
prefixes in the Internet with continuing exponential
growth.
As someone else pointed out earlier in this thread,
this is not a new proposal, and probably could have
been implemented years ago. Besides the obvious problems
(is there sufficient address space allocatable to make
this work), it would require an IP translation lookup
at the beginning of each "call" to translate the logical
IP address to the physical IP address.
Prabhu
From: Hank Nussbacher [mailto:hank@att.net.il]
Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2001 9:10 AM
To: Stephen Stuart; nanog@merit.edu
Subject: Re: Statements against new.net?> > Do you see many scandals around people who own cool IP
addresses?
>
>IIRC, there was an "issue" around the assignment of
16.1.16.1; I don't
>think lawyers had been invented back then, so the scope of
the scandal
>remained relatively small.Lets see, the US gov't mandated phone number portability.
How long will it
be before they mandate IP address portability? Then everyone
will want
their /32 to be portable. Even Junipers handling of 2.4M prefixes:
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?site=testing&doc_id=4
009&page_number=10
will begin to buckle.
-Hank