RE: The Gorgon's Knot. Was: Re: Verio Peering Question

[Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch () muada com>]

On Thu, 4 Oct 2001, Simon Lyall wrote:

> > Even better would be if the RIRs would divvy up the world in 10 - 20
> > regions, and allocate a /8 - /10 to each.

> I'm afraid that doesn't work. It's great when there is exactly one
> provider and nobody multihomes. As soon as people start multihoming then
> they have to start announcing smaller prefixes everywhere.

Only when multihomers routinely connect to networks that only interconnect
outside the region. In other words: as long as there is at least one
widely-used interconnect point in the region, this should not be a
problem. (There are some (rare, IMHO) failure modes that are not fatal
with current  practice that are in this scenario, though.)

10 to 20 regions means about three regions to a continent. That's not too
unreasonable.

> Sift things around for a few years and you have people in that region
> connecting to every possible backbone provider plus most of the 2nd tiers
> and misc other countries.

But Asian/Australian networks tend to connect to the US west coast,
European networks to the US east coast. And even if a relatively large
number of exceptions exist, savings are possible.

> Didn't we have this argument with 8+8 ?

I wasn't there... But the argument shouldn't be about how much this will
help, but about how much it will hurt. I don't think it will hurt anyone,
so even if there is just a chance that it will help, we should do it.