On Mon, 12 Feb 1996, Paul Ferguson wrote:
Creating a consortium [akin to the NAP model] of small ISP's could easily resolve this problem, if all address space allocated to each ISP was contiguous and could be aggregated to a larger prefix.
This has been suggested on numerous occasions.
It's not only been suggested, but I believe it's been somewhat implemented. :) Back in September '94, Chris Alan (Electriciti) and a few others came up with an idea called PCH -- Packet Clearing House.
The primary concept was, as you suggested, connect a bunch of small ISPs together using shared resources and address space and peer with the "big boyz." Unfortunately I haven't been involved with it lately, so hopefully someone that has can share if it was successful or not.
-jh-
The unfortunate requirement of such scheme to work is that all address space allocated to the small ISP's has to be contiquous so that it could be aggregated to a larger prefix under an autonomous system. Given the completely arbitrary manner adopted by the Internic's address allocation policy, (eg. 4 C's to ISP A, skip a few C's, 8 C's to ISP B where A and B can be 4,000 miles apart) it is safe to assume that the small chunks of C class addresses are geographically dispersed throughout the States with many holes still unassigned or unaccounted for. If you are talking about swamp, this is it. However, a survey for how those chunks of address got broken up into many different places perhaps can help in the direction of finding such solution. If these small IP pieces can be grouped together according to their geographic locations, there is chance that some broken chunks may be pieced together to form large enough piece by pure luck. If such solution exists, I am sure someone would be interested in forming such regional consortiums to help salvage the once lost IP addresses. SC SC
unaccounted for. If you are talking about swamp, this is it. However, a survey for how those chunks of address got broken up into many different places perhaps can help in the direction of finding such solution. If these small IP pieces can be grouped together according to their geographic locations, there is chance that some broken chunks may be pieced together to form large enough piece by pure luck. If such solution exists, I am sure someone would be interested in forming such regional consortiums to help salvage the once lost IP addresses.
SC
Neat! Garbage collection on the IP address space. The computer really *is* the network! -David
unaccounted for. If you are talking about swamp, this is it. However, a survey for how those chunks of address got broken up into many different places perhaps can help in the direction of finding such solution. If these small IP pieces can be grouped together according to their geographic locations, there is chance that some broken chunks may be pieced together to form large enough piece by pure luck. If such solution exists, I am sure someone would be interested in forming such regional consortiums to help salvage the once lost IP addresses. SC
Neat! Garbage collection on the IP address space. The computer really *is* the network!
-David
Perhaps you might have received a note from the IPGR robot asking if your address space can be reclaimed? If not, expect one or more in future. More info at NAONG next week and PIER at IETF. -- --bill
On Tue, 13 Feb 1996, Simon Chan wrote:
unaccounted for. If you are talking about swamp, this is it. However, a survey for how those chunks of address got broken up into many different places perhaps can help in the direction of finding such solution. If these small IP pieces can be grouped together according to their geographic locations, there is chance that some broken chunks may be pieced together to form large enough piece by pure luck. If such solution exists, I am sure someone would be interested in forming such regional consortiums to help salvage the once lost IP addresses.
I don't believe it requires "pure luck." I would hope that a group of individuals would be able to convince the InterNIC into delegating a /16, in return for either an equal amount of smaller CIDR blocks or somewhere in the neighborhood. If some of those smaller delegations happened to be continguous, the InterNIC would then have the responsibility and option of turning them into a larger block or simply re-delegating them out to new organizations at their discretion. Small providers are the ones that tend to have the smaller CIDR blocks (/18 and above). If a number of these organizations were to "join" together using an exchange point mechanism, with multiple long-haul carriers connecting (e.g. NSPs) to a single point, you could achieve a good level of aggregation. For example, rather than the "Internet," having to deal with 8, /19 announcements, the rest of the world would see a single /16 announcement. Wow, so we just do this in a few hundred places and you've lowered the overall routing table by 8 * N(hundred). The main problem, as we all know, is this isn't a stable marketplace. Not only is there fierce competition for staff, but also for customers. Why would a number of small providers want join together? -jh-
On Tue, 13 Feb 1996, Jonathan Heiliger wrote:
Wow, so we just do this in a few hundred places and you've lowered the overall routing table by 8 * N(hundred). The main problem, as we all know, is this isn't a stable marketplace. Not only is there fierce competition for staff, but also for customers. Why would a number of small providers want join together?
Well actually, there isn't a fierce competition for customers and I somehow doubt that there is much competition for staff. The market is growing by leaps and bounds. The value of the Internet exists only because service providers work co-operatively and exchange traffic with each other. In just about every market there are STILL new startup ISP's who are succeeding. Yes, there are failures, but the failure rate is very low and it's only the most incompetent fools or incredibly unlucky ISP's who are having problems. There are definitely advantages for a lot of small ISP's banding together by buying access through a 3rd-party exchange point. One is that they now gain the benefit of the exchange point's technical staff. The small ISP needn't learn all the details about BGP peering because the exchange point does it for him. And when the exchange point technical people can help out the small ISP's (their customers) with technical problems that are beyond the ability of the small ISP's own staff. There is a limit to the size an ISP can grow to and still provide top-notch quality service. In every market I am aware of, ISP's who focus on quality service are reaping the rewards in spite of often higher prices than their competition. Therefore I believe that the market naturally has room for many small ISP's and will continue to do so. The "exchange point" concept also provides opportunities for the more technically sophisticated ISP's who are tired of handholding dialup customers. Many new dialup customers have NEVER USED A COMPUTER BEFORE! Anyway, such an ISP can drop or de-emphasize their dialup services and become an exchange point by focussing on providing leased-line services to other ISP's. How is this relevant? Well, if you want to encourage greater aggregation in the global Internet, one way to do so is to explain to ISP's how a more structured Internet can be of benefit to them by allowing them to focus on a market niche and become real good at that rather than try to be a jack-of-all-trades ISP who hasn't time to do any one thing very well. This kind of structure may make it easier to get knowledge about renumbering filtered down to the masses or it may indeed make renumbering less urgent. Michael Dillon Voice: +1-604-546-8022 Memra Software Inc. Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com E-mail: michael@memra.com
participants (5)
-
bmanning＠ISI.EDU -
David Kovar -
Jonathan Heiliger -
Michael Dillon -
Simon Chan