At 18:23 23/08/01, Roeland Meyer wrote:
<quote> "Half of the companies that are multihomed should have gotten better service from their providers," says Patrik Faltstrom, a Cisco engineer and co-chair of the IETF's Applications Area. "ISPs haven't done a good enough job explaining to their customers that they don't need to multihome." </quote>
Is Patrik Faltstrom still an IETF co-chair? Is he still helping the [failing] credibility of the IETF? Maybe, that's why? How can any ISP, or anyone else, credibly guarantee that they'll still be in business next year? Or, that they wont sell out to the very rich bad guys? Or, that circuit provisioning will drop to under 5 calendar days? Because, that is the *only* way you will convince business customers that they don't need to multi-home.
Rather than just bash the IETF (which is easy), it might be just slightly more productive to wander over, subscribe to the relevant list(s), and inject some operational perspective and/or clue. Browsing http://www.ietf.org will yield information on current draft, WG charters, and how to join any lists of interest.
At $99US for 512MB of PC133 RAM (the point is, RAM is disgustingly cheap and getting cheaper), more RAM in the routers is a quick answer. Router clusters are another answer, and faster CPUs are yet another. All of the above, should get us by until we get a better router architecture. If the IETF is being at all effective, that should start now and finish sometime next year, so that we can start the 5-year technology roll-out cycle.
One belief (right or wrong) is the end-to-end path convergence algorithm in BGP is close to hitting its scaling limits. That's a problem that infinite RAM could not solve. A proof that the algorithm is not a danger here would be most welcome in many circles. If you've got such a proof, please do share. Ran rja@inet.org