On Tue, 3 May 2011, Daniel Roesen wrote:
Why do businesses pay for their competitor's business?
I'm going to sum up my reasons for my views in this email and then most likely stop writing as this is going nowhere. I started using the Internet in early 90ties and as soon as I heard about PI, I thought it was a great idea and why shouldn't I have one? It's great for me, I never have to renumber. Then I started working with routing and udnerstood how this global system worked, and all of a sudden I understood the global implications of PI. I still think it's a great idea for each individual, but bad for the humanity as a whole. It's just like driving a hummer to go shoe-shopping is a bad idea in that it's wasteful to use this resource. A DFZ route has to be carried by everybody, meaning as the DFZ increases, everybody has to upgrade their platforms, whether they might need it for bandwidth reasons or not. It also means people have to buy more expensive platforms. The largest 1U L3 switch FIB size I know of is the Extreme Summit 480X, it can do almost 512k IPv4 routes. With IPv4 and IPv6 table still growing, I'd hesitate to recommend anyone to buy it right now because it won't be able to handle DFZ in 3-5 years. This means someone who wants to take the DFZ needs a bigger and more expensive platform that most likely uses more energy over its lifetime, not to talk about what it costs to manufacture it. In my 10-15 years in core routing, I've seen the table rise from ~100 to ~350k routes, but the platforms haven't gotten very much faster compared to the routing table size. They still take tens of seconds to converge when it comes to programming all these routes into FIB, and the algorithms we use to calculate the routes are from the 1980ies or earlier. As far as I know, there are no magical new much better ways of doing this on the horizon, most of the improvement suggestions involves doing overlay networks or having end systems be more flexible on their behaviour regarding how tightly services are bound to addresses. So to sum it all up. I don't trust moores law to keep up with routing table growth if we let "everybody" get PI, but it seems I am in very much minority here with that view. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se