Hi Nick, On Mon, 18 Sep 2006 22:07:36 +0100, Nick Hilliard wrote:
How about taking the potential money received for PI to finance a better BGP / routing technology or at least memory for poor ISP's ?
Can we please kill this "let's get RIPE/NCC to charge more money for X so that we can give it to Y" idea for once and for all?
Fully agree. I just used this argument to demonstrate the effect of "let us charge money and build administrations".
The Bundespost argument (repeated by pretty much all telcos worldwide, as far as I can tell) was to a large extent FUD based on presumption and fear of the unknown. Routing table growth is a well defined phenomenon which costs real money to deal with.
In the 9600 baud modem age it was also possible to use a 2 MBit/s line as the international uplink of a national ISP. Today we have to invest into fibre links which cost real money to deal with. We should think of restricting high bandwidth applications by RIPE to certain adresses and create a high speed permit agency ;-/
The "PI routing issue" does not exist, at least in the terms that you're using here. What exists is a large growth in routing table size, due to - inter-alia - PI announcements, PA subnet announcements and the fast organic growth of full PA netblocks.
And most of the table growth is due de-aggregation of large prefixes into bundles of subnets in non-RIPE regions. The policy of the RIPE NCC will change _nothing_ with this, as an ISP you will have to face the fact that routers will need more resources in the future.
Also, large distributed databases are of no real relevance to switching IP packets at 10G speeds.
There are technical solutions for technical challenges ... A distributed database with 180k prefixes is not really large using todays hardware. In my opinion the "memory problem" just exists because of the sell-next-level-due-to-hardware-limits policy of some router vendors. Interesting: Take the 256 MByte roughly required on some systems for a two upstreams full table, subtract 1/4 for the OS and divide the difference by 180k, this yields about 1100 bytes per prefix. Yes, 1100 byte. You may probably store the whole written history of all PI end site companies within this space. Just for your information: - One of the backbone routers with full-mesh and full-table this email is passed over just takes 30 MBytes (!) for the whole 180k prefix RIB. And it works as expected. Just to show that things can be made better.
However, this is not particularly relevant to proposal 2006-05. The proposal may - slightly - increase the rate of uptake of PI assignments in the RIPE catchment area, and this may proportionally increase the number of prefixes in the routing tables. But the only thing that's stopping people from registering /24's at the moment where they really need less than this amount of space, is their inclination not to lie to RIPE. Removing this (almost) requirement to lie to get a /24 is not going to open up the flood gates and cause the internet to collapse.
Agree. Best Regards Oliver Bartels Oliver Bartels F+E + Bartels System GmbH + 85435 Erding, Germany oliver@bartels.de + http://www.bartels.de + Tel. +49-8122-9729-0