On Thu, 21 Sep 1995, Sean Doran wrote:
P.S.: This raises an interesting point that has been raised in private email to various folks concerned with 206/8: if local aggregation cannot be done, then I suppose it would be easy enough to have some well-connected provider somewhere generate a prefix that is 18 bits long or shorter and deliver to the subnets appropriately. Whether this would be done out of the goodness of that provider's well-connected heart, or for a fee, is an interesting question.
Are you suggesting some sort of exchange point or NAP specifically to break out longer prefixes from shorter prefixes that cannot be topologically aggregated? Would something like this enable people to maintain provider independent addressing (i.e. no renumbering) by merely paying a fee to an exchange point that is well connected and settling for less optimal routing? If this will work in practice, it seems like the perfect tradeoff. On the one hand you must renumber when changing providers but you get optimal routing. On the other hand, you avoid renumbering but you pay a few bucks and have less than optimal routing. Am I missing anything here? Michael Dillon Voice: +1-604-546-8022 Memra Software Inc. Fax: +1-604-542-4130 http://www.memra.com E-mail: michael@memra.com