[ipv6-wg] Re: [address-policy-wg] Re: 200 customer requirements for IPv6

> Well, you haven't been paying attention, because I've presented 
> "provider-internal aggregation based on geography" at two different 
> RIPE meetings a while ago.
> 
> The only thing I got was perplexed stares.

If your presentation was as cursory as the slides I
saw on the web, I'm not surprised that you got perplexed 
stares. I think that people need to be led through the concept
step by step in more detail.

Also, you need to deal with existing prejudices.
Most people have preconcieved notions about geographical
addressing which boils down to geo = bad. They either
think it is some flaky idea about encoding physical
coordinates in addressing, or some idea about giving nation
states control over addressing or something that was rejected
by the IETF in the past and therefore cannot be retrofitted
in the IPv6 protocol. It is a big job to get past these
prejudices and get people to actually think about things.

The root of the idea is for the RIRs to cooperate in allocating
IP addresses so that they can be aggregated more widely. In 
other words, so that it is not necessary for every allocation
to become an announcement in the global routing table.

Of course, this means that RIRs and ISPs have to cooperate in
allocating IPv6 addresses using a rough kind of geographical
plan. I suggest that this plan be anchored to the major cities
where most interconnecting is done. This is also roughly aligned
with the topology of the network if you can manage to visualize
an entire city (Paris, London, Hannover, Krivoy Rog) as a single
node in a network. It's that level of abstraction that leads to
making sense of this kind of aggregation.

As you pointed out in the slides, it is not necessary for
interconnect to happen in a specific geographical location
in order to gain some benefit from this. Of course, one would
hope that eventually every ISP will migrate to interconnecting
in each city where they carry traffic, but that is not a precondition.

I have taken to calling this kind of thing "geotop" addressing
because it comes from noticing that there is a "rough" alignment
between geography and topology. I think we should leverage that
rough alignment to dampen routing table growth, and therefore
buy time in the same way that we bought time with CIDR and
dampening of growth in IP address allocation.

--Michael Dillon