[[pushed the wrong button last time. This is the complete reply]] > - join a local IXP, which may be a physical switch or > virtualized by a set of bilateral agreements.
Why should they join an IXP if they already have private peering arrangements? > - outside the region, they advertise the prefix of the > regional authority Mixing government with operations? If you favor doing that then why not just give IPv6 addresses to the various national governments and let the UN sort it out? Personally I disagree with any scheme which calls for national or municipal governments to assign IPv6 addresses to end users. Dressing it up as a "regional authority" does not make it any nicer. Forcing people to join an unecessary IX is not the way to solve the problem of regional aggregation of routes. This is a purely technical problem which can be solved by the RIR practices in allocating IPv6 addresses. If they would allocate addresses in a geo-topological manner then end users and ISPs would be free to aggregate routes outside of their region without any involvement of governments or any requirement to join consortia or IXes. It does require the users of such geo-topological addresses to ensure that in THEIR region, there is sufficient interconnectivity (physical and policy) between ISPs for the addressing to work. But that does not need to be determined or managed centrally. Geo-topological addressing refers to RIRs reserving large blocks of designated addresses for areas served my large cities (over 100,000) population. When end users are located in fringe areas roughly equidistant between two or more such centers, the RIR simply asks the end user (or ISP) which is the center to which they want to connect (communicate). This addressing scheme operates in parallel with the existing provider-oriented IPv6 addressing scheme but uses a different block of IPv6 addresses out of the 7/8ths that are currently reserved. No hardware or software changes are required for this to work, merely some geographical/economical research to determine the relative sizes of the address pool to be reserved for each of the world's 5000 largest cities. > Whenever I have talked about the model with an ISP, I have gotten > blasted. Basically, I have been told that > > (1) any idea on operations proposed in the IETF is a bad idea because > the IETF doesn't listen to operators This is true. Top-down does not work in Internet operations. We need bottom-up, i.e. customer demand. The IETF needs to view their role as enablers of customer demand. If the IETF can create something that will work for ISP customers, then ISPs will be happy to go along, once the customers demand the service. > (2) the ISPs aren't going to be willing to make settlement payments > among themselves in accordance with the plan Wait until this starts appearing as a requirement in custome RFPs. > I'm not sure how to proceed, given the level of invective I get in > any discussion with anyone on the topic. Perhaps the IETF needs to seek input, not just from ISPs, but also from ISP customers, the end users of the network. > Note 2: Provider-provisioned addresses continue to make sense for > folks that don't plan to multihome. Indeed they do. But the current IPv6 addressing model is completely slanted towards provider-provisioned addresses for single-homed entities. Calling a small block of these provider-provisioned addresses PI (provider independent) does not really make the addresses provider independent and does not help small enterprises to implement meaningful multihoming. The IETF has imposed this provider-provisioned model on IPv4 and is thus directly responsible for the ISP cartel which now exists. --Michael Dillon
