On 5-Oct-2005, at 15:22, Jeff Shultz wrote:
Interesting. Balkanization of the Internet anyone? As one other
commenter hinted at, it does sound like a recipe for encouraging
multi-homing, even at the lowest levels. How many ASN's can the
system handle currently?
It's a 16-bit number; 0 isn't used, and the IANA (per RFC 1930)
reserves 64512 through 65535 for private use. So from a resource
allocation perspective, the answer is 64511.
There is a proposal to introduce 32-bit AS numbers. See, for example:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-idr-as4bytes-11.txt
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-huston-idr-as4bytes-
survey-00.txt
We have talks scheduled for Los Angeles about AS number exhaustion.
Joe