This is broken by design. What would have happend if this had be done before the fiber glut in the late 90's? As far as I am aware a couple of new fiber routes have been build and a few more cities have become nodes.
I am not suggesting time machines. I am proposing that this be done now, after the fiber glut has largely been built out and when we are in a much better position to understand how the global network will evolve. That's why I suggest that the planning for the aggregation hierarchy should be done in the regions. They know more about the topology of their region and the pressures (economic, political, social) that will drive the evolution of the network in their region.
Anything that takes geography into the routing is plain and simple broken.
Then why do major American providers require peers to be in 16 or more geographic locations? Why do people aggregate addresses geographically in their networks? It can't all be broken.
Today you hop on a plane and fly directly and non-stop from Geneva Airport to Chicago O'Hare. And it takes only 12 hours instead of one to two weeks.
Good example of geographical routing. Anyone near Chicago who wants to travel to Territet or Fribourg or Dijon doesn't need to know anything more than it is near Geneva. The national border between Switzerland and France is irrelevant since it is easier to get to Dijon France via Geneva than via Paris. However, if you make a mistake and go to Paris instead, it's not so bad, just a few extra hours. That's an example of best effort routing.
Not that this is unimportant but it's no longer where people go or come by.
Technically speaking, I don't care about where people go or where containers go. It's the fiber routes that I care about and these usually lead to interconnect points or exchanges in the major cities. I worked for GTS at the time they were building Flag Atlantic. Even though we knew that the cables landed at Crab Meadow and Long Beach, we still referred to that end as the New York end because we were only planning to connect customers to the link in the city of New York. On a trans-oceanic hop it doesn't make a lot of difference if the traffic lands in a Sprint Pop and then has to go crosstown to MCI's PoP before being routed to its destination in Rochester. Why do the Europeans need to see the topology of New York State in order to efficiently route traffic? 10 years ago we didn't have the RIR system in place to help us with geographic addressing. Today we do. Now you might be able to convince me that we could achieve similar goals by putting together route registries, RIRs and some magic pixie dust. As far as I'm concerned, geographical route aggregation is necessary for the v6 network to scale. It will happen, the only question is how we solve the problem. We won't solve it by badmouthing ULAs or SCTP or Multi6 or 32 bit ASes. The problems are real and the demand for workable solutions is real. Note the plural on the word "solutions". --Michael Dillon