I have a couple of phone lines at home, I use different long distance carriers on them, and I like it that way, so that if either Sprint or ATT or MCI fail, I have a backup choice of just picking up another phone. If I understand John's argument right, he is playing the same game by having multiple service providers, presumably at his extra cost, using them as backup for each other. Sounds like a good idea to me, especially given the lousy quality of the network at large that I hear complaints about from people all over the country lately (someone should do a survey with end users to qualify this). He does not want to renumber every time this Sprint routing loop appears (or whatever problems any of the providers may have). He just wants enough flexibility to attain the services he needs. Well, the CIDR stuff was kind of neat, as it helped prolonging the current addressing agony, but have we really taken the next steps (short of saying there will be more bits to confuse routers with in the future)? CIDR may actually be more useful in areas with less competition and less AS diameter. CIDR clearly can work well in a backbone-regional-campus, or a PTT-client, or so, model. It works less well of there are more mesh-demanding levels (like some edge service providers needing redundancy with their long distance ISPs that operate on their behalf). This is not a protocol problem, it is an administrative and architectural problem of how to design a system that accomodates the needs of at least 95% of the Internet clients at a satisfaction level above the 95th percentile. It is not clear to me whether anyone is really working on that (I think NANOG and the IEPG should). That will have to accomodate "lower level" service providers (as well as end sites) to have robust and redundant interconnections with multiple service providers. Once you provide dial-tone percentile levels of services, they may go back to a single service provider. Until then... I know you know all this, but I thought I throw it in anyway.