In the interconnected world, geography is very much irrelevant to best path routing. It's all about speeds and feeds where a local-access T-1 is obviously not preferable to a cross-country OC-3. Sounds nice on paper, but isn't really where things are at these days. Now on the other hand if bandwidth were unlimited and we all had great super-duper links between every ISP regardless of tier, THEN geographical routing would make sense. Whether you have 16 or more geographical locations doesn't necessarily equate to geographic routing. It's still longest prefix match which may be interrupted by misconfigured filters, or other circumstances. This is what happens when we try to borrow ideas from the 40-50-year-old telecom world and how basic call-routing worked in a TDM environment. Scott -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Michael.Dillon@radianz.com Sent: Tuesday, November 30, 2004 9:28 AM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Sensible geographical addressing [Was: 16 vs 32 bit ASNs yadda, yadda]
Anything that takes geography into the routing is plain and simple broken.
Then why do major American providers require peers to be in 16 or more geographic locations? Why do people aggregate addresses geographically in their networks? It can't all be broken.