Sascha Lenz [SLZ-RIPE] ---------------------- Small companies start with small routers, PC based Linux Quagga Boxes, or Routerboards, or Juniper J-Series or whatever - not really much costs here (see other replies). --------------

They will not be able to "start with small routers", because calculating constantly changing routes (presumable from several sources) costs processing power, routing decisions with huge routing table cost processing power, even receiving and sending plain packets costs processing power. And all this costs money. PC-based routers are not able to do all of this at once and in this anount. The "selfish" small ISPs could easily drive himself into trap of

[...] trouble

when they have to spent much more money for equipment (and made all others do it) rather than using PA from LIR.

do you have any numbers on that? because i don't see it. Even my old Pentium4 route servers do very nicely with that. --------------------- With what? My company is very small and even currently used hardware routers can't handle 3-4 (1Gbit|sec) upstream connections efficiently (doing BGP in addition of course). When we add several hundred thousands IPV6 routes we are going to extremely upgrades our infrastructure, but smaller ISP (business...) which can't pay $100/month will not be able to do so definitely.

Sascha Lenz [SLZ-RIPE]

And look at the processing power of the Route Engines of the hardware routers... wow are they slow! ------------------------ You know - they are different. :) Mostly they have distributed computing environment and hardware programmed to do specific operations, huge backbones and many-many other things which PC lacks. The widespread PI will definitely adds significant amount to the number of routes, so your forwarding problem will be much worse. Regards, Vladislav Potapov IIAT, Ltd. P.S. Sorry for some earlier messages without signature.