I was assuming that for the most part, the end users of these addresses are going to be connecting via a larger transit provider, not directly to the interconnects. Well, in that case, the user should CLEARLY get a prefix from the service provider. In any case, all routers in the area we draw the abstraction around will have to know where everyone else is... Presumably, if mountainview.net is connected to sprint via a router at fix-w, then the sprint presence at mae-w and the NAP will announce that next-hop for mountainview.net is via them. Incoming packets that hit the NAP will then go via sprint for the last hop. This is exactly the free transit that we've been describing. And you'll note that you have no aggregation as Sprint now has a longer prefix running free internally. Another alternative, if the big backbones around here object to that complexity, is to put a smaller version of this at each of the local interconnects (a /9 at the NAP, a /9 at MAE-W, ...) rather than draw the boundary around all the interconnects inclusively. This was Ran's proposal. While this works, you have to understand what it doesn't do: it doesn't eliminate the need for renumbering. What happens when you flip from one interconnect to another? I am not trying to make this thing work before the idea is really cooked well enough, but to really make a serious dent in announcements then we need to look at constructs like this, if not identical to this, becoming more standard. Right now, larger ISPs aren't getting large blocks, and they are allocating things in non-contiguous non-growable blocks, neither of which is good. Nothing is being done to organize topological assignments at all, which is seriously not good. Well, I agree that more coordination is a good thing. This is the place to do it. But arguing about address allocation strategies again isn't useful. We should be at the point of fine tuning them. I see this as a potential strong first step towards demonstrating what we can do by topologically assigning things. I haven't seen serious proposals for better topologically significant assignments. We have to start somewhere. Wow. What do you think the previous flame-fest was about? Tony