Danny McPherson: Saturday, May 13, 2000 1:47 PM
None of these are big enough to justify their own backbone operations or to buy a backbone from someone else, or there wouldn't be a problem. Paying scads of extortion money is also problematic (cheaper to simply burn the IP addresses).
I am NOT advocating tossing all of that out. I am simply bringing up a problem condition. Please, don't shoot the messenger, or otherwise get defensive (return fire is a bitch).
Nope, all of these are reasonable, the ones that aren't are, for example, where folks have a single connection, or multi-home only to a single provider.
Agreed, peering on a single connection is a canard. However, there is a cause/effect relationship with the latter. They can't multi-home to multiple providers because they aren't big enough (can't justify the cost). Which is precisely part of the problem that I am presenting here.
What I am bringing up here is that new, information-age companies, as predicted in MegaTrends over 10 years ago, are now starting to appear. They are very diffused (sparse population, over very large areas of the globe) and have connectivity needs which are both critical, yet very different from click-n-morter customers that the Big8 was built up to handle (either classful or classless). The current architecture is not handeling them very well.
The problem is currently in it's infancy, it will get much worse.
I'm not disagreeing with any of this. Actually, I see reliability and availability feeding into all these other issues as well.
The reason this is an issue is exactly because they want reliability and availability, HA requirements.
It just that some of the folks advocating portability and deaggregation are using "route table size doesn't matter anymore" as an argument, when it absolutely does matter, especially if we plan to make the Internet more reliable, and less vulnerable.
I actually agree with you here as well. relying on infinite router table growth is not a scalable strategy. We need something else.