--On Wednesday, 29 August, 2001 8:32 PM +0200 Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch@muada.com> wrote:
So we don't want to force networks in the default-free zone to buy bigger routers with more memory, but it's ok to force them to essentially build a second network by having redundant pops in every city?
Noone is forcing anyone to do anything. Providers have a simple financial incentive to build redundant network - customers pay more for connections with higher availability and diversity. There is currently little financial incentive for carrier's to carry other people's microallocated / 'TE' routes, as /many/ of these do not materially affect goodput, and/or are goodput to destinations less interesting than the cost they incur. If I could think of a good way to measure usefulness of a prefix [1], I'd bet that the (positive) corelation between it, and number of IP's in that prefix is declining, but I bet small prefixes are still considerably less useful than large ones, but cost the same. [1] measuring traffic to/from prefixes against prefix size (i.e. 2^(32-len)), as a % of total traffic, and plotting these over time, would make an interesting research study. Perhaps someone working in a research department at a major backbone already has some stats they could do something similar with. Alex Bligh Personal Capacity