No. I do not want a routable large scale global Internet. I want a mixed mode Information SuperHighway which is a mixture of routing and layer-two switching. In fact I have that right now extensively internally, and increasingly externally. I believe that the the routed form will have some hierarchy, but it will NOT be exclusively hierarchial. PSI did hierarchial routing in 1992 internally and transparently to everyone. In fact at the current scale of the routed form there is no need for hierarchy architecturally. You have an IMPLEMENTATION problem in the NSFNet backbone and some other "key" places which will not accept any larger routing tables. What if you used cisco's with 64Megs of memory or 128Megs? Would we be playing "henny penny" right now if that was true? Should we really be considering a routing architecture imposition at 100,000 routes or 200,000 routes? The implications of CIDR are extensive and have not been "sold" to the world, there is no carrot and thinking that you can impose all hierarchial routing on everyone is niave. I think your metaphor of phone numbers is wrong, I think the metaphor is portable 1.800 imposed by the FCC and embraced by everyone who used it. You are going in the opposite direction and are imposing non-portable 1800 implicitly with CIDR, it will not play in Peoria. Sign up for temporary compression of the routing table and then growth beyond the current volume some number of months later. Forget renumbering, you are a party theorist and your cadre does not represent the entire soviet. You REPRESENT the research Internet taking a position on the way the global public Internet is going to growing up is absurd. You've no experience on what is happening in the real world of providing the service to end customers. There are lots of issues you have not given any creedance to even if you have given them limited consideration. But nothing in your messages leads me to believe that you have given them consideration. I'll bet we could have flat routing if less than 100 places did some upgrades, and then we could keep some of the benefits of flat routing. PSI is doing CIDR, but we are NOT signed up for some of the draconian theories you and others are espousing. so Forget - renumbering (ready to deal with Solomon's or GE's lawyers?) - not accepting individual network numbers (or Columbia's?) - continued growth (you will compress, and you will slow, you will not stop) We will have to incent (carrot) people to do the right thing, you have no plan (predictable government style), we need to come up with one, and it will then take 12 to 18 months to have material affect. Marty
Let us try to answer your question with another question:
Do you want a routable large scale global Internet ?
It is hard to imagine supporting a truly huge Internet without relying on hierarchical routing (CIDR is simply a realization of hierarchical routing).
And if you do plan to rely on hierarchical routing, then you need to understand how to deal with the issue of containing address entropy (due to switching among providers) without renumbering. It seems naive and perhaps irresponsible to think about flat routing (based on network numbers). It should be a goal to make this renumbering simple.
We'd like to suggest that folks with alternative proposals to CIDR should put their alternative proposals on a table and explain, among other things, how their proposals would be deployed and used and how these proposals would be better than CIDR. Hitting the right time frame turns out to count!
When people got network numbers in the past they were getting addresses for the research Internet. It is important to understand that the research Internet was a great thing, but we are now working on the global public Internet and we desperately needed new routing and addressing systems. We should establish that we are in a transition from the research Internet to the global public Internet and we subsequently can not just use uncoordinated IP addresses and still have a workable system. This is not dissimilar to what happened when local phone exchanges started to get interconnected during the advent of long distance telephone services. There needs to be a globally coordinated address space to make this work. Reasoning by analogy with the phone system is a powerful argument. People change phone numbers all the time, they don't absolutely revolt because the phone system is so valuable. Some elect to get 700 numbers, but they *PAY* for this service.
We suggest the following subjects be carefully considered:
The old addresses of the research Internet need to be reorganized into the global public Internet addressing plan which is based on CIDR.
Those addresses not currently globally routed will not be routed. These new customers of the Internet should get their addresses from their immediate providers. (This could be softened if there is a commitment by the customer to enter into the transition ASAP). This also would cover the case of provider switching under CIDR.
Those addresses that are currently routed will *eventually* be migrated to CIDR allocations. This may take some time, on the order of years (2-5). We could look for the simple cases first (small/tiny sites).
It is not fair to get people to renumber when they attach to the Internet when they see that people already attached are just sitting pretty. We need to be consistent in the application of standards and rules.
Marty has brought up the subject of a carrot:
The carrot is getting global Internet routing.
The stick is not getting global Internet routing.
It is a dull and boring argument, but it is the core of the debate. There is extreme value in what we are trying to build with the global public Internet, and we need to impress on the customer base that we need their help to make it possible to achieve our goals.
We are not saying this is going to be easy, but it is rare that something worth having comes for free.
Peter & Yakov
P.S. The number of uncoordinated IP addresses is higher than 30K.