On Wed, 3 Apr 1996, Paul A Vixie wrote:
sooner or later we will have to kill off the /24's, which make up 70% of the routing table but offer way less than 10% of the total reachable destinations. perhaps now that address ownership has been put to bed, the gang of big providers can agree on a date after which they will all stop listening to or exporting any prefixes longer than /23? THAT would be the incentive the industry needs to look at private addressing and aggressive renumbering. who's willing to risk collusion lawsuits and lost customers? step right up and sign the register please.
I would recommend that the PIER group work with providers on this; PIER would be a great organization to take the huge ACTIVE table of /24's and mail the listed contacts for the network to offer tools, easier renumbering methods, etc., to minimize impact to the network's customers. Once all the mails are sent out and a semi-generous grace period is set, PIER should recommend a date providers should stop listening to /24 announcements. Granted, ISP's wouldn't have to follow this recommendation and could cut off such announcements at any given time; they follow the risk of more impact to their customers as Paul mentions above. I would ALSO recommend to ISP's who wish to implement this that they not be hypocritical. We've heard the ISP stories where particular ISPs want to filter out routes for larger prefixes, but are GLAD to advertise a /23 if it gains that particular ISP money. /cah