Subject: comments on draft-py-multi6-gapi-00.txt

From: Kurt Erik Lindqvist <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Feb 2003 09:59:35 +0100

I have gone through the above draft again and started thinking. 
Although the draft as such does not give any solution in itself to 
mulithoming it is part of other solutions. I am not convinced it scales 
though. I somehow have the feeling it is no different than the 
TLA/NLA/SLA model that was abandoned.

Mainly my concerns are that this is based on statistics. The draft says 
that the options that are available to base this on is geography or 
population. I would add Geopolicy and economics.

If we take Sweden or Switzerland as examples, these are countries with 
relatively small populations but with a high number of large 
multinationals per capita. Multinationals will have a higher burn rate 
of addresses, especially in multihoming than "ordinary" users will. 
With the GAPI addresses, instead large countries that might have a 
lower order of multihoming is gaining advantage.

You can also argue that address consumption will most likely NOT follow 
geographic boundaries. If I take Stockholm, Ericsson for example have 
their HQ in a relatively unpopulated area. Also the "swedish silicon 
valley" have a high number of multinationals that will want to 
mulithome, but relatively small population.

The more I think on this, the more I think that any model that tries to 
align address usage / availability to Geopolitics, economics, address 
usage, etc - will not scale. We will end up just adding more and more 
allocation blocks and the situation will be similar to todays.

- kurtis -

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From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Feb 2003 11:09:00 +0100 (CET)

> mulithome, but relatively small population.

I'm sure address consumption won't follow the population spread.
However, there is only one other objective way of pre-allocating address
space: on geography. This both wastes a lot of address space and fails
to provide enough of it. In the end, it all comes down to people: they
own/operate equipment that needs to be connected over multiple lines.
I'm sure many more people own or run a multihomed network in the
Swedish silicon valley than in a rural province of China, but the gain
you get from allocating less for China is much smaller than the hassle
of having to manually look at it and justify your decision.

If we are generous there are 25000 multihomers at this moment, spread
over the US/Canada and Europe. That's around 600 million / 25 thousand =
1 multihomed network per 24000 inabitants. The current GAPI figures
provide for a /26 for Sweden. So that's 8833000 inhabitants / 4194304
multihomed /48s = 1 multihomed network per 2.1 inhabitants.

Obviously at these levels of multihoming the number of multinational
organizations becomes irrelevant.

Please note that although the address allocation mechanism supports
these levels of multihoming, that doesn't mean my other draft does. If
you get 4 million multihomers in Sweden and a router can only take a
250k routing table, you need to interconnect with 16 or 32 different
routers in Sweden. That's not good. (But at least this way the problem
has moved from "unsolvable" meaning loss of connectivity to "solvable by
throwing money at it" meaning we get to make an economic tradeoff.)

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From: Kurt Erik Lindqvist <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2003 09:37:27 +0100

> of having to manually look at it and justify your decision.

The problem is how you make sure you get enough addresses where they 
are needed, without having to reallocate space.