IIRC, the IPv6 address string includes a field for your AS number. I don't recall the bit length of that field, though. (in addition to a field designating what PLANET you're on...) -Chris
Rather than allocate AS numbers as we do today, why not make an AS simply be a globally unique 32 bit number, and establish a convention that AS numbers must come from a customer's netblock? That is, if I'm assigned 10.0.0.0/24, I could pick 10.0.0.1 as my "AS" number (or 10.0.0.37 for that matter) and I just start announcing it.
The thought is many providers prefix filter routing announcements. The same filter could be applied to AS numbers. Networks would never have to 'allocate' ASN's (sorry arin, no $500 for you), and if they needed two they would just need 2 IP addresses. The global uniqueness is still guaranteed, and the owner can be tracked (via IP allocation, of course).
Right now the up-sides and down-sides I know about cancel out in my view, so I can't put this forth as a proposal I support at the moment, but perhaps with some discussion I can be moved to the firmly a bad idea or firmly a good idea camp.
-- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org Systems Engineer - Internetworking Engineer - CCIE 3440 Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request@tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org
-- --------------------------- Christopher A. Woodfield rekoil@semihuman.com PGP Public Key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xB887618B