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

[Tony Li]

On Oct 17, 2010, at 10:52 AM, John R. Levine wrote:

>> 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.
> 
> No, and it wouldn't help since in the Internet unlike the phone system there is little relationship between routes and national boundaries.


There is a theory that as we allocate major blocks from the RIRs, that we will be able to do some proxy aggregation at the continental level and would recover a significant amount of routing table space.  However, as with any proxy aggregation approach, the interaction with traffic engineering and the mechanism for effective deployment is an unresolved issue.

One thought that has been in the hallways is establishing a routing arbiter function, analogous to IANA that would help coordinate where proxy aggregation would occur.


> Route tables are a different issue.  IPv6 will make them smaller, since people are more likely to be able to get a single allocation that's big enough for the long time, but it's also easier for people who aren't network operators to get their own PI space.  


To date, the number of stub ASes showing up in the routing table suggests that the cost of the pervasive PI allocation far exceeds the benefits of a single prefix for growing ISPs.

Tony