Ref: Your note of Mon, 20 Mar 1995 14:26:03 -0500 Jeff,
... I am very concerned about having the ISPs performing address allocation, particularly addressing aggregation.
There are certain *fundamental* issues that one may choose to ignore. However, this still doesn't change the fundamental property of these issues. Relation between address space allocation/management and the ability of the Internet routing system to scale is *one of these issues*. Here is a brief recap of what had been stated on MANY occasions. The need to accommodate routing in the growing Internet requires to perform routing information aggregation/abstaction. Both the current routing technology, as well as proposals for new routing technologies (e.g. Nimrod or Unified) assume that the hierarchical routing information aggregation/abstraction will be used as *the* fundamental technique to deal with the growth in overhead costs of running the routing. For the hierarchical routing to work, addresses have to reflect *where* in the network you are. Changing providers means you've changed where you are, which in turn means you may need to change your addresses. Host autoconfiguration capabilities isn't a "rocket space" science, but would certainly greatly help to accommodate the ability to change providers in presence of hierarchical routing. Granted this wouldn't address the problem of dealing with the installed based, but we are not aware of any other alternative (except for the NAT boxes and/or application layer gateway alternative) that wouldn't require *any* changes to the installed base, while at the same time would accommodate hierarchical routing and would allow to change providers. Noel Chiappa & Yakov Rekhter