On Thu, 4 Oct 2001, Simon Lyall wrote:
Even better would be if the RIRs would divvy up the world in 10 - 20 regions, and allocate a /8 - /10 to each.
I'm afraid that doesn't work. It's great when there is exactly one provider and nobody multihomes. As soon as people start multihoming then they have to start announcing smaller prefixes everywhere.
Only when multihomers routinely connect to networks that only interconnect outside the region. In other words: as long as there is at least one widely-used interconnect point in the region, this should not be a problem. (There are some (rare, IMHO) failure modes that are not fatal with current practice that are in this scenario, though.) 10 to 20 regions means about three regions to a continent. That's not too unreasonable.
Sift things around for a few years and you have people in that region connecting to every possible backbone provider plus most of the 2nd tiers and misc other countries.
But Asian/Australian networks tend to connect to the US west coast, European networks to the US east coast. And even if a relatively large number of exceptions exist, savings are possible.
Didn't we have this argument with 8+8 ?
I wasn't there... But the argument shouldn't be about how much this will help, but about how much it will hurt. I don't think it will hurt anyone, so even if there is just a chance that it will help, we should do it.