On 3/20/13, John Curran <jcurran@istaff.org> wrote:
On Mar 20, 2013, at 2:25 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:
However, if there were motivation on the provider side, automated BGP configuration could enable consumers to attach to multiple providers and actually reduce support calls significantly.
Do you really think making a large SP making theirt customers' configuration more complicated, using a protocol at a scale its implementations were never designed for, will amount to a reduction in net average support costs? See... I think there is an economic argument to made against massive multihoming; upward sloping supply curve situation, ultimately slots in the global routing table are a competitive market. Providing service to a network that wants to be multihomed could be expected to incur a greater marginal price on the provider (additional overhead to implement, maintain, and service the more complicated service). If that added price tag exceeds the amount that the customer values their marginal benefit from multihoming, then requiring multihoming hurts the provider, because a lesser quantity is purchased, and hurts the customer, because their increased payment in excess of the benefit is added cost. The more multihomed customers, the more routes, the greater the marginal cost of adding every BGP router, the greater cost of every route advertised, which you could speculate the tier1's will ultimately be passing onto service providers, and then the customers, in due time. The increased price tags reduce the quantity of services purchased.
If you can figure out a way to persuade service providers of this belief, I would ask that you also persuade them that they have to offer dual-stack for all of their customers (which may have already resulted in them losing a small number of customers who expected IPv6 by now... :-)
Until people are actually using dual-stack services, the current perceived benefit is $0, so it's really a tough argument to make. You have to rely on the prediction, that within a few years, dual-stack services will provide the added benefit of full internet reachability, and ipv4-only services will have significant impairments.
Thanks! /John -- -JH