If I am paying for those routes then I have a contractual right. If you don't want my redundant feed, and the route advertisements that go with it, then don't take my money.

Please detail the exact costs of a, BGP inserted, routing table entry. Is it, maybe, 50 cents? Now, how much are you getting for a DS1 link? What does that cost, exactly, considering that an outfit capable of setting up multi-homing are probably the folks that your techs never hear from, but once a year? That appears to be a margin that is far above keystone. How greedy do you want to be?

The point you're missing is that the important issue is not whether or not your ISP will carry and advertise your routes, since you are paying them to. The important point is whether or not anyone else will carry your route. There's no reason for a RIR to make a microallocation just so you can advertise it to your ISP. If the advertisement was purely between contracually bound parties, the block could be part of a provider's larger block and there would be no difference. The only reason for a microallocation is to get a party with whom you do not have a contract to accept a route that they would not otherwise accept. Why else would a multihomer want a microallocation? Why not just use a chunk of a provider's IP space? The only answers are: 1) We don't want to be held hostage by a provider. (No good, not a technical justification.) 2) We want others to accept our smaller routes. (Why not do it by contract?) DS

On Mon, Aug 27, 2001 at 09:57:29PM -0700, Roeland Meyer wrote:

BTW, randy's position is rather strange, coming from someone that used to support the FidoNet community, by being the FTSC chair.

Correct me if I'm wrong, since it's been a few years, but FidoNet address aggregate quite nicely, don't they? --msa

On Mon, 27 Aug 2001, Roeland Meyer wrote:

Please detail the exact costs of a, BGP inserted, routing table entry. Is it, maybe, 50 cents?

What is the cost of the prefix inserted with causes somebody other's boxes to crash and burn? The "last" one? We don't know at which point the network simply passes the threshold of being able to converge faster than the next update comes. That does not make the cost of every update pushing the network closer to that point immaterial. Unlike traffic overload, routing flap overload is _not_ self-correcting. In fact, given the present technology it is very likely to be self-amplifying (i suspect that most current BGP implementations in case of severe overload would simply delay keepalives until peers start resetting sessions; having BGP to run over strictly serializing transport (TCP) does not help, either). The only known non-capital intensive fixes are route aggregation and intentionally degrading routing system responsiveness (aka flap damping). Both have severe limitations. When they run out of gas, it's forklift upgrade to the new generation of routers. Keeping up with Moore's law is not free. So far, the current backbone upgrade cycle kept up. Assuming that the capital cost of the backbone routing equipment installed globally is about $5bln (this is an out-of-the-blue figure), and it currently works at design capacity with approx. 100k prefixes, the per-prefix cost of forced upgrade is about $50k, not including labour costs, and indirect costs of decreasing network stablility causing customer dissatiscfaction and resulting in expensive customer churn. Obviously, not all cost may be attributed to maintaining routing infrastructure ("traditionally" the upgrades are justified by the need to maintain competitive backbone speed). Times have changed, though, and upgrading switching capacity no longer has to be a wholesale box replacement. Unfortunately, this is not the case with routing update processing capacity (having parallelized routing stack implementations helps, but not all that much). Therefore, the cost of extra prefix is definitely not $0.50; it is _much_ higher. --vadim