nanog mailing list archives

RE: Statements against new.net?


From: "Kavi, Prabhu" <prabhu_kavi () tenornetworks com>
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2001 09:59:53 -0500


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


-----Original Message-----
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? 



At 23:39 14/03/01 -0800, Stephen Stuart wrote:

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


(The coolness factor was the binary representation, of course.)

Stephen






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