Around 04:18 PM 12/8/1999 -0500, rumor has it that Vijay Gill said:

On Wed, 8 Dec 1999, Dean Anderson wrote:

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ip is a connectionless protocol. before hitting the reply key, think about that.

I thought about it. It seems to me that a router is not presented with a stream of randomly addressed packets. In any time frame, there are going to be from 1 to many hundreds of packets between the same set of addresses.

This is a major fallacy.

Yes, fallacy that you can do this today with current routers. I agree. But the problem is that the existing routers are too slow. Jared says let the buyer beware. Well, if you nail the roughly current routing policies described, we run out of space in practice much sooner that we would otherwise. So the space becomes more valuable. Subnetting A's and B's is inevitable. Router technology will need to be more robust in the future. But the choice comes down to this: Do it (figure out how to do it) or run out of useful space a lot quicker than we expected to run out of actual space. --Dean ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Plain Aviation, Inc dean@av8.com LAN/WAN/UNIX/NT/TCPIP http://www.av8.com ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++