[rrg] Consensus call: Reject proposed strategy F?

[Marshall Eubanks]

On Dec 31, 2008, at 12:27 AM, William Herrin wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 4:10 PM, Brian E Carpenter
> <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It is not known with any scientific or engineering accuracy when
>> vanilla BGP4 will reach an economic or technical scaling limit (i.e.
>> when it becomes financially or physically impossible to continue
>> beefing up core BGP4 routers to cope with growth in the size or
>> update frequency of the BGP4 routing table).
>
> Brian,
>
> I've been chewing on this one. Is it correct? Are we unable to say
> with scientific or engineering certainty that BGP4 has an technical or
> financial upper bound somewhere prior to 10M entries?
>

I would suggest that this is not quite the point. I feel quite  
comfortable
predicting that companies will make and sell routers capable of handling
any size BGP table necessary. There are pretty smart people and
strong financial incentives to make this happen.

The real question is, who will be able to afford them ? The current  
Internet "ecosystem" has a mix
of players of different sizes, and it seems to me that the real goal  
here
is to continue to allow that to be possible.

> If not, what's the case in favor of focusing any efforts on non-BGP
> solutions at this point?

Look at Vince Fuller's talks on this subject. Growth trends in BGP  
table size, computer speed,
etc., seem unfavorable for keeping BGP affordable. If you disagree, or  
see a solution to this, this
IMHO would be a good place to discuss it.

> And what's the justification for maintaining
> the IETF recommendation that the RIRs impose artificial restrictions
> on the minimum allocation size? Or for that matter any restrictions at
> all on IPv6 assignment in multihomed environments?
>

That is another question, but at least in IPv4 it has the benefit of  
clarity.

Regards
Marshall


> Regards,
> Bill Herrin
>
>
> -- 
> William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
> 3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004
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