Kai Schlichting <kai@pac-rim.net> writes:

And what I'd really like to know: how many millions and billions were spent by domestic telcos to accomodate and ultimately deflect anti-trust action heading their way regaring local, 800 (and soon: cellular, at last!) number portability ? (lets call it xNP)

I mean: there must be an order of magnitude of increased HD space, RAM and SS7 network bandwidth in use right now due to xNP. Which means that the telcos probably asked their vendors to provide such capabilities for their switches - and got what they asked for!

Lets face it: if the US PSTN can accomodate tens of millions of essentially freely-routed (well, the stubs of the SS7 network are certainly very static, heh) phone numbers, it must be possible to scale the Internet beyond such a small pisser: a 1/4 million routes in the BGP table.

The issue isn't in storing hundreds of thousands, millions, or tens of millions of routes. This is, all things considered, a piece of cake. The issue is getting the route out of storage, for each packet coming through the router, at a rate of millions of packets per second for each core router. Each IP core router is doing about the same lookup work as the whole combined PSTN network is for all of its freely routed numbers. It is, or should be, quite viable... but not easy, as we've all found. -george william herbert gherbert@crl.com