Re: multi-homing fixed

[Alex Bligh <alex () alex org uk>]

--On Wednesday, 29 August, 2001 8:32 PM +0200 Iljitsch van Beijnum 
<iljitsch () muada com> wrote:

> So we don't want to force networks in the default-free zone to buy bigger
> routers with more memory, but it's ok to force them to essentially build a
> second network by having redundant pops in every city?

Noone is forcing anyone to do anything. Providers have a simple financial
incentive to build redundant network - customers pay more for connections
with higher availability and diversity. There is currently little financial
incentive for carrier's to carry other people's microallocated / 'TE'
routes, as /many/ of these do not materially affect goodput, and/or
are goodput to destinations less interesting than the cost they incur.
If I could think of a good way to measure usefulness of a prefix [1], I'd
bet that the (positive) corelation between it, and number of IP's in
that prefix is declining, but I bet small prefixes are still considerably
less useful than large ones, but cost the same.

[1] measuring traffic to/from prefixes against prefix size
(i.e. 2^(32-len)), as a % of total traffic, and plotting
these over time, would make an interesting research study.
Perhaps someone working in a research department at a major
backbone already has some stats they could do something
similar with.

Alex Bligh
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