On Sunday the 17th of December Sean Doran stated pretty clearly why Sprint wasn't using the Routing Arbiter database. I am very surprised that neither Bill Manning or Elise Gerich or anyone else involved with the project has so far come back and said no...Sean....your interpretation was wrong. Here is what we did. And we did this because........ Does the lack of response from the Routing arbiter to Sean mean that it has no problems with Sean's description of what it did and why it did it? To refresh folk's minds, here is what Sean said: The principal problem is that the RSes and the whole IRR are only as good as the databases are, and the bulk of the RADB was populated from the wrong source. Rather than doing what I would consider the correct thing -- that is, watching peerings between the RSes and the providers participating in the various RS tests and tracking down all the information from the IRR based on what was seen there, verifying routing policies with end sites -- they started with the PRDB and hoped that fate would cause the RADB to become more correct. To be brief and blunt, the RA team started with information explicitly designed to PREVENT connectivity between "bad" (evil, greedy, commercial) networks and "good" networks which would be AUP compliant. I'd think common sense would indicate doing some extra (and well paid) work to instead start off with something approaching a model of the reality of interconnectivity. Moreover, another disappointment is that one could easily assert that a strong reason for using the PRDB as the source of information from day #1 was that MERIT was already spending its resources maintaining that database and toolset in a deal with ANS to keep ANS's network routing working much the same way during the many months while they figured out how to move on from the end of the NSFNET backbone service. In short, I think the chief failing of the RADB is not the toolset, the concept, or the long-term plan, all of which make some to alot of sense. Instead, what seems to have killed it dead is that the RA was too busy to commit the *serious* effort it would have taken to populate the RADB with information from reality in the first place. ******************************************************************** Gordon Cook, Editor & Publisher Subscriptions: Individ-ascii $85 The COOK Report on Internet Individ. hard copy $150 431 Greenway Ave, Ewing, NJ 08618 Small Corp & Gov't $200 (609) 882-2572 Corporate $350 Internet: cook@cookreport.com Corporate Site Lic. $650 Web: http://pobox.com/cook/ Newly expanded COOK Report Web Pages ********************************************************************