Again, phone numbers and their portability can and should not be compared with the IP address portability issues. They're very different animals.
That's your elephant. My elephant looks different. Phone numbers and IP addresses are exactly the same. They are numbers used to identify the location to which I want to connect. They are allocated from a numbering plan with a fixed number of digits/bits. The numbering plans are running out of space. One solution being used in both telephony and IP networks, is to carve out smaller allocations (CIDR/pooling) to make the number plan last longer. Sometimes the fact that phone networks are like pink elephants, not grey, is important. Other times The grey elephant keepers watch the behavior of pink elephants to learn about elephants in general. I never suggested that one could mindlessly apply techniques from the telephony world in the IP network world. But we can understand our problems better if we compare them to the telephony world, the ATM world, and maybe even the world of Advanced Data Path Routing Techniques for Three Tier KVM Networks? http://www.tron.com/i0000032.html There are also lessons to be learned outside the world of telecoms networks by studying the distribution of market towns in ancient Mesopotamia or the crystalline lattice of the skeletons of diatoms and dinoflagellates. --Michael Dillon