Subject: RE: Newbie Question about addressing impacts

From: "Christian Huitema" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2004 18:06:38 -0700

> On the other hand, such behavior is unacceptable from a "Internet
> citizenship" perspective and does not address the similar business
issues
> that moderate size corporations (e.g., 100,000 employees) have, which
> would influence them to behave in a manner similar to the Fortune 100.
But
> if moderate size corporations do this, then why not smallish
corporations
> (e.g., 20,000 employees) act similarly? After all, they have similar
> "bottom line" concerns, which are certainly as valid as those of the
> Fortune 100. And if they behave similarly, then how about small
companies?
> And before you know it, aggregation is out the window, and that is A
Very
> Bad Thing.

Is it, really? The IPv4 routing tables currently have about 100,000
entries, and the sky is not falling. So we should assume that 100,000
entries is OK now, in 2004. If I remember correctly, the equivalent
limit was about 10,000 entries in 2004, ten times less ten years ago. We
might imagine that the limit will be ten times higher ten years from
now.

The entire earth population is not expected to reach 10 billion people
any time soon, which means there cannot possibly be more than 100,000
companies with 100,000 employees world wide, or a million companies with
10,000 employees. This pretty much implies that we could flat-route all
the companies with 100,000 employees now, and all of those with 10,000
employees ten years from now...

-- Christian Huitema

---

From: Tony Li <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2004 20:26:08 -0700

> employees ten years from now...

You're absolutely right Christian, and since memory is cheap, we should
seriously consider ditching this IP business.  Let's just bridge 
everything
together.  In ten years, we'll be able to support 10 billion MAC 
addresses
in our bridging tables and we'll avoid all of these routing issues.

</sarcasm>

In case folks have not noticed, thanks to certain people carrying other 
stuff
in inter-domain protocols, the minimal requirement today is to carry 1e6
routes already.  This number is driven by the Internet routing table 
size,
as people want to be able to support carrier-of-carrier VPNs, resulting
in VPNs that are part of the default-free zone (DFZ).

If we grow the Internet routing table to say 1e6 routes, then the VPN
demands will be something like 1e7 or 1e8.  This will be yet another
tax on the carriers and will get passed on to us, the consumers.

I think that it is in our common interest to keep the routing subsystem
efficient, stable, and cheap.  Saying that we don't have a problem
today because the sky is not falling is like saying that nothing is
wrong because we're not dead yet, so go right ahead, have another
<insert your favorite self-destructive vice>.  Those of us who would
like to live a wee bit longer will excercise a modicum of moderation
in how we treat the common infrastructure.

Regards,
Tony

---

From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2004 10:57:50 +0200

On 15-aug-04, at 3:06, Christian Huitema wrote:

> The IPv4 routing tables currently have about 100,000 entries, and the 
> sky is not falling.

I'm not so sure. I have several customers who are experiencing random 
BGP instabilities from time to time. I haven't figured this out 
completely yet, but there seems to be a disconnect between the number 
of BGP routes and the amount of processing they require (MD5...) and 
the CPU speed in the routers.

> employees ten years from now...

We can argue whether this is desirable, but a more fundamental 
objection is that this implicitly assumes one route per company. In 
other words: companies must transport internet traffic between 
different sites over their own infrastructure. That's not very cost 
effective these days.