John, On Oct 2, 2007, at 8:25 PM, John Curran wrote:
At 7:01 PM -0700 10/2/07, David Conrad wrote: Most organizations connecting to the Internet want at least a few static unique addresses for web and mail servers.
Do they? I suppose it depends on your definition of 'organization'. Presumably, your definition excludes nearly all home users and most SOHOs who outsource their web pages and mail services. It would be interesting to see actual data from ISPs describing where their address space is going today, but I imagine they consider this confidential. However, you seem to be assuming there will be no change in end user or ISP behavior as the IPv4 free pool runs out and after. This seems stunningly counter-intuitive to me, but presumably you have a reason for making this assumption. Care to share?
My imaginary boundary? Interesting. You are asserting that ISPs are going to start accepting prefixes longer than /24, particularly in the face of the FUD spread about how everybody's routers are going to turn to slag? Why would they do this? A lot of ISP's will have no choice but to announce such or lose the asking customer to someone who will...
"announce" != "accept".
The largest ISP's are very likely to accept longer routes from each other in order to facilitate their own continued growth, and pay the cost of the router upgrades (presuming they can actually upgrade fast enough to keep up with the tragedy of the commons run on "free" address table entries...)
You are asserting that the largest ISPs will simply accept everything thrown at them up to and after their routers start falling over. Again, this seems stunningly counter-intuitive to me. This hasn't been ISP behavior in the past nor present. Not sure why you think it will be their behavior in the future.
Again, we've been here before. You and I both have the t-shirts. What happened when routers started falling over circa 1996? Why do you believe things will be different this time? Presumably you have a reason. How does AT&T refuse numerous additional prefixes from BT, if they in turn need to announce numerous additions in order to grow?
The fact that a peer refuses to accept your customer's very long prefixes would be unfortunate, but presumably no ISP guarantees network behavior in networks they have no control over.
Sales and marketing never take kindly to being told "stop selling, we're full", and doubly so when competitors are busy connecting new customers without adhering to all this route filtering stuff in the way the quarterly numbers.
Sales and marketing can continue to sell IPv4 /32s if they so desire and they might even be useful on the network they represent. However, one would hope sales and marketing folk are not making assertions about how other networks operate, what those networks will accept and route, etc. Even if the sales and marketing folk are making such silly assertions, presumably standard ISP T&Cs limit the responsibility of the ISP to the network they have direct control over.
Nope. Fragmentation will occur. The question is to what level. Why should an ISP go in and modify its existing prefix length filters in order to gain routability to somebody else's new customer? See above. They'll change it the day they're asked and find themselves needing to announce longer prefixes as well. Really, the ability of filtering to survive in the face of competitive pressure was already well-tested, and the result are: they don't.
They didn't because technology had advanced to the point where they were no longer necessary. Routers on the network imposing the filters weren't falling over, thus the network engineering arguments that they couldn't remove the filters because routers would fall over would no longer fly.
If you were actually worried about an explosion of routing information, I'd think you'd be campaigning for greater implementation of prefix length filters on the legacy /8s that are likely to be the first entrants into a free for all. Sounds like wonderful idea... run with it.
"You" != "me". You are the one who is asserting that the routing sky will fall if the current monopolistic command economy alters. I believe ISPs will look out for themselves and do what is necessary to protect their own infrastructure such that they can continue to operate. You appear to see the ISPs as victims without any control over their own fate. Maybe they are and I should sell their stock short.
What is your proposed alternative to a market in IPv4 addresses and, more importantly, how are you going to enforce it? IPv6, and publicly arguing against betting the Internet in the absence of a solid plan.
So you are saying that other than everyone magically transitioning to IPv6 before IPv4 free pool exhaustion, you have no alternative and no way to enforce the status quo. Strangely enough, that is what I am suggesting. I guess where we differ is in the assumption that the lack of a solid plan implies the law of supply and demand is rescinded. Regards, -drc