On 29 Sep 2001, Paul Vixie wrote:
so there's going to be a limit. the number of routes allowed into a router shall be non-infinite. that limit can be selenforced in a number of ways:
1. total number of routes 2. total number of routes per peer 3. prefix length
<sarcasm> #4 most-used/least-complaining Analyze NetFlow to determine where 80-90% of your traffic (by volume or flow-count) originates/terminates, build a filter to only accept those routes (or ASN's). Your route table would probably be 20% what it is now. Customers would fill out a Web form to request routing to filtered blocks, and the most popular requests would be added. You could do this for customer routes as well, so you only advertise the top 80-90% of customer routes, and tell the rest of your customers they don't use enough bandwidth to justify a route table entry. </sarcasm> Companies are paying money to get more, reliable bandwidth. There is value-add created by multi-homing that people are willing to pay for. Those who stand to most benefit from this demand are not the ma-and-pa ISPs, it's the same big companies who already own most of the market. Anything that stops the demand hurts them more than anyone else. Asymmetric filtering ("I won't accept yours, but expect you to accept mine") certainly get's people's attention, and if everyone filtered it would definitely make the problem go away, at least temporarily. But the market /will/ be satisfied, you can't permanently deny the demand for more, reliable bandwidth. Maybe before you could stop or slow down the train, I think it's likely now it'll run you over. As long as there isn't a solution that solves the problem, we'll keep having these same discussions, with different 'stupid' work-arounds. Asymmetric filtering does not solve the problem the market is willing to pay to solve. Progressive dampening and Multi6 look more promising. Consider where we would be now if the solution to address-space depletion was 'don't assign any more addresses'. Thank goodness for a solution (CIDR) that accomodated the demand in a way that was tolerable for most people. It wasn't exactly what the customer wanted (their own portable Class A), but it solved the problem well enough for most people. What solution will be analogous to CIDR in this situation? Pete.