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

> The same is true for geographical aggregation.
> Geographical aggregation would require free transit, otherwise
> it is not compatible with the ISP's business models.

Geographical aggregation does not REQUIRE free transit.
It is up to the ISPs to decide how to leverage geographical
aggregation, how to recover transit costs and how to
construct and change their business models. We should 
not assume that any of these things are static and
unchangeable.

> There is no free transit and thus it doesn't work.
> Business relations changes all the time and in a global markets
> world these business relations don't stop on country boundaries.
> 
> Such boundaries are artifical, the EU tries to avoid them.

Nevertheless, the Rhine river still exists. The Alps still
exist. Is it easier to get fiber across the Rhine or through
the Alps? This kind of geography affects the roads, railways
and fiber paths throughout Europe. It affects the economy
of European cities which determines the location and size
of these cities. The city level of geographical aggregation
clearly works. The real question is whether or not there
is a level of aggregation possible between city and continent.

I think that this question will only be solved by looking
a the cities and the communication between them. In some
regions there will be natural clusters of cities that
form a natural aggregation grouping, for instance the
U.S. East Coast. But in other areas there may be no clusters.

In any case, national boundaries will almost never be related
to these clusters except maybe someplace like China where
culture, language and economy are closely tied to the national
borders. But that is an exceptional case and perhaps it is
no longer valid. Hong Kong, China has close ties with Singapore,
another country. And cities like Khabarovsk, Russia probably
have more economic ties with China than with Moscow.

It's really a question for geographers to answer, not
network engineers. So where are the geographers on this 
policy mailing list?

> What they try is interleaving the West-East (X) and North-South (Y)
> coordinates bitwise in the search key and handle overruns by exceptions,
> like:

Geographical aggregation does NOT require geographical 
coordinates to be encoded in address bits.

In fact, once the RIRs have decided how many addresses to
reserve for each city greater than 100,000 population, and how
to cluster cities in to larger groupings, there is no need for
anyone to think about the geographical issues again.

--Michael Dillon