[ih] IP addresses are not phone numbers, was Some Questions over IPv4 Ownership

[Alan J Maitland]

John,

Good points and I really enjoyed your use of the term "peripatetic traveler".

Does anyone on the list know if there is a plan to more 
geographically allocate IP addresses in V6?  It seems like doing that 
might make it easier to control routing table sizes.  In other words, 
I'm going back to a section of one of John Curran's contributions to 
this discussion earlier talking about CIRs, which seem to flow down 
from RIRs (see 
http://www.scribd.com/doc/29487289/ARIN-Contribution-to-ITU-T-IPv6-Study-Group 
).

What I gleaned from that link was that using the RIR to CIR structure 
looks a little like the hierarchical structure of DNS.  If portions 
of the V6 address space could be allocated in a way that was 
geographically aligned to the RIRs and CIRs and maybe even regional 
routes within a country by major carrier, would that not take some 
load off the primary routing resources?

Best,

Alan

At 10:51 PM 10/16/2010, you wrote:
> >  All it takes is motivation. The phone company was motivated to
> >separate phone numbers from switch ports by mobility. Is there a
> >similar motivation in the IP world to make a 128 bit hex number
> >permanent personal property?
>
>I suppose that if the motivation comes along with trillions of
>dollars, maybe.  In the real world, no.
>
>RFC 3482 has a well-written overview of the way that telephone number
>portability works.  Anyone interested in the topic should read it
>before speculating about how it works or making analogies to other
>services.  Go read it now, I'll wait.
>
>There's a couple of rather essential differences between routing phone
>calls and routing IP packets.  One is that phone numbers, unlike IP
>addresses still have a great deal of geographic locality, since number
>allocations are tied to geography, and number portability is limited
>to within local areas.  Regardless of portability, all numbers that
>start with +33 are in France, and all numbers that start +1212 are in
>New York City.
>
>This means that the phone system doesn't need anything analogous to
>the Internet's backbone routers that know all 300,000 randomly
>allocated IP address prefixes.  All they need is a few hundred
>international country codes, or a few thousand prefixes in a
>portability area.
>
>Another rather important difference is that the phone system only
>needs to do one portability lookup per phone call or per SMS.  Even
>the most enthusiastic teen texter sends only a few messages per
>minute, as opposed to a computer which can easily send hundreds or
>thousands of IP packets per second, each of which has an IP address
>that needs to be routed.
>
>Mobile phone roaming doesn't work like number portability; it's
>basically call forwarding.  No matter where in the world you go, your
>phone and phone number are still tied to your home carrier.  If you
>and I are standing next to each other in the US, and you call my
>mobile phone which has a UK phone number, the call goes from the US to
>my carrier in the UK, and then back to the US.  The home carrier needs
>only to remember which network a roaming user is on, and perhaps a
>routing number on that network.  Roaming databases update very slowly;
>even the most peripatetic traveller is unlikely to register on more
>than a few networks a day.
>
>So while it is sort of plausible that people could have portable email
>addresses using DNS lookups, e.g. whatever at user.isp.com rather than
>user at isp.com, there's no way that's going to happen for IP addresses.
>Fortunately, since we have the DNS, it doesn't much matter what your
>IP addresses are.
>
>R's,
>John