RE: CIDR Report

["Roeland Meyer (E-mail)" <rmeyer () mhsc com>]

> brett watson: Monday, May 15, 2000 11:44 AM

> > C'mon. I'm obviously not suggesting it is as easy as "ask
> and ye shall
> > receive". My point here is that demand drives the market, and if it
> > becomes clear that routers with faster BGP implementations
> are what is
> > needed, that is just what the vendors will (eventually, at least)
> > develope.
>
> you're forgetting (or not admitting here) that a corporation's primary
> motivators are profit and shareholder value.  a vendor will surely
> develop anything that gains them significant market share, or
> significant increase in profits, or significant increase in revenues.
> driven by demand alone, a market is not.
>
> "routers with faster bgp implemetations are what is needed" is what we
> say, but the question a vendor asks is "does it increase my profit
> margin, revenues, or market position?".  what we "want" is mostly
> irrelevant.

I beg to differ, the real issues are "find what the market wants, give
it to them". The problem is that they haven't figured out how to give it
to us. We have to help them, if we want it bad enough.

A lot of us, in the new dot-com arena, have a certifiable need for a
portable /24. Truthfully, that's about all we do need. What we also have
a need for is multi-homing over a very large and diverse area. The usual
reasons for this (availability/reliability) is not the ONLY reason for
this requirement. Actually, I listed three scenarios; small company with
intercontinental locations; large dot-com with regional many
co-locations; virtual companies with large collaboration networks.

Under the current system, what we are forced to do is either obtain a
/24 for each location (even when there are <16 hosts there), or
"engineer" our way into a portable /20 so we can participate in peering.
Either method burns IP addresses (one engineering trick is to stop using
NAT) in huge gulps. Most of us, being more than a little bit social
conscious, cringe at the act of burning the IPs. But, the system makes
us do it anyway. Alternatively, we let the system dictate our
business-model and stop developing global dot-coms (not! -  try flying
*that* past a VC <heh> I'll even let you borrow my flame-suit).

The real short-term answer is to universally allow /24 announcements (I
disagree with going below /26). If router capabilities do not support
this than then the vendors will have to be encouraged to beef up their
equipment. (Having just bought three Cisco Catalyst 6509s, with 3524XL
end nodes, in the past six months, another few $20K wouldn't send my CPA
into a tail-spin.) However, no amount of hardware is going to change
filtering policies and that's why I bring this up here. What are the
operational alternatives?