At 10:51 AM 7/31/2005, Joe Abley wrote:
On 31 Jul 2005, at 01:23, Robert Boyle wrote:
I agree that implementation sooner rather than later is a good idea, but all of us already have a 2-Byte AS so although we care in theory and believe it is a good idea, we don't _really_ care as much as the first guy who gets a 4-Byte AS will.
The first guy who gets a 4-byte AS number is going to be one of our customers. If we want to be able to talk BGP with him, we need 4-byte AS number support in our edge routers.
ISPs who have an interest in continuing to win transit customers past 2008/2009 should be interested in getting 4-byte AS number support, regardless of how many 2-byte AS numbers they already have. ISPs who plan to stop getting new customers don't need to bother :-)
As new /8's of address space are going up, various folks on NANOG have asked for test addresses within the block to be made live so that testing can be done. Given the interest in whether 4 byte AS numbers will function, when will a test network be put up using a 4 byte AS, and announced so that everyone can test their readiness? A server hosted on such a network probably could produce a weekly report, similar to the CIDR report, that shows the differences between two byte AS connectivity and 4 byte, and gives a list of the networks that have issues with 4 byte AS space. At least that way there'd be some real data to argue about.