At 01:49 AM 7/2/97 -0400, Sean M. Doran wrote:
The idea is to conserve the amount of work any given router has to do with respect to convergence, since that's a poorly-scalable hot-spot.
In the past the hot-spot may have been the amount of traffic through a box, such that so few fat interfaces could be used that it was economically compelling to move that particular load into some sort of L2 switch and take the lumps wrt inherent routing scalability problems and the lack of conservation of configuration effort.
Since there are existence proofs that this hot spot is now no longer economically insurmountable, and some much crunchier boxes are on the near horizon, the argument for using smart L2 fabrics at all is becoming weaker.
Sean, We're involved in a discussion on pagan@apnic.net about whether the Internet can afford to have a bunch of small multi-homed ISPs connected to the net with PI /19s. IMHO, there is not adequate participation by folks of your level of expertise. Would you join the discussion please? While I suspect you are subscribed to the list, I'll be glad to forward recent posts if you so desire. I appreciate your consideration of the matter and your time. Thanks, Larry --- Larry Vaden, founder and CEO help-desk 903-813-4500 Internet Texoma, Inc. direct 903-870-0365 <http://www.texoma.net> fax 903-868-8551 bringing the real Internet to rural Texomaland pager 903-867-6571