Alexis Rosen wrote:

Bill Simpson claims that this idea is ~10 years old, but if so perhaps it's time to air it again....

It's dead simple, really: Assign address blocks to pairs of providers. Both providers announce those blocks all the time, and assign addresses out of those blocks to customers who multihome between those two providers.

That idea also assumes that providers exchange specifics within shared blocks. Otherwise it won't work. Doesn't sound like big savings... And is certainly a hell to manage. I demonstrated some time ago that the lower boundary on the routing table size given today's Internet topology is about 300 routes. That was done by analyzing AS-paths -- i.e. the assumption was that everything can be aggregated down to 1 route per AS. The result generally indicates that 90% of routes can be eliminated by renumbering and aggregation. The rest is simply too few to worry about. --vadim