Not necessarily true. I live in California. However, 703-842-5527 is a valid phone number for me. It even worked for me while I was in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. I can take that number pretty much any where in the world, whether temporarily, or, even if I move there.
This isn't just a US phenomenon. Companies like http://www.telphin.com/numbers.php are selling this kind of number portability in other countries. And I remember some Australians were routing US phone numbers to their mobiles back in 1997. Clearly, telephone numbers are now being treated as names rather than addresses. The technical issues we should be concerned with are down at the address level. Could continental aggregation be a way of reducing the size of the so-called global routing table so that the table can accomodate a larger number of specifics within the continent? Alex Bligh raised the spectre of GRE tunnels to redirect traffic to the right location. Could this be done by simply readdressing the packets? Is this even relevant in a world that runs IPv4 and IPv6 over MPLS? After all MPLS is designed to swap and pop destination labels to route and reroute packets through the network. In a real-world network perhaps we should accept that some problems will be solved outside of IPv6. --Michael Dillon