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

> The cost of leased lines is mostly dominated by
> - competition / available number of carriers
> - spare capacity
> - (central) locations of the end points
> 
> It is no longer dominated by line length. 

Of course, you are talking about esoteric costs measured
in Euros that are only of interests to a few providers.
To the vast majority of Internet users it is clear that
a path between Wiesbaden and Frankfurt is much cheaper
that a path from Wiesbaden to London to Frankfurt. That's
because the vast majority of Internet users measure the
cost of a path in milliseconds of delay.

> >Or does it pass through Frankfurt because it
> >is a neighbouring city?
> 
> No.

Well actually, your first response could be interpreted
to mean that it often does pass through Frankfurt but that
someone determined to find the best price can find a path
directly to London for a lower price. In any case, if 
everyone in the Frankfurt-Mainz-Darmstadt-Wiesbaden area
decided to start using geotop addressing for their IPv6
routing that does not prevent Wiesbaden from favouring
a direct path to London over a path through Frankfurt. And
since Wiesbaden is over 100,000 population, it will have its
own city reservation which will likely be accepted in route
announcements in London even if it is filtered in route 
announcements in New York.

And none of this has anything to do with what routes an 
ISP carries internally in their network. If a New York ISP
sells a direct link to a Wiesbaden ISP, I would expect them
to carry a Wiesbaden prefix in their IBGP even though most
New York ISPs filter at the regional Fr-Ma-Da-Wi boundary.
As for free transit, if this New York ISP accepts traffic
for Wiesbaden in their San Francisco PoP then they can
easily identify it and pass through a charge to the Wiesbaden
ISP. But if the Wiesbaden ISP does not agree to pay such
charges then the New York provider can also easily block
such traffic at their San Francisco PoP. An address allocation
scheme does not mandate operational or business activities.

> The key point is: The property "traffic belongs to ISP X" is
> _much_ more important than the property "traffic belongs
> to region Y". 

End users, especially in the USA, disagree with you. They
think that the traffic belongs to the end user and that
the ISP is paid to carry it to its destination, period.

> E.g. one might have a peering with ISP X,
> which means settlement free traffic exchange, compared
> to transit. Thus there is always the need for the full table
> if one would like to implement complex routing policies
> to consider quality and economical facts.

A smart ISP would consider that settlements and similar things
would be better handled in OSS servers rather than in routers.
And then the routing table size is no longer such an issue.

> A regional ordering as dominant criteria would blow up the
> table dramatically, because of the need of the "from ISP"
> information for every region.

Nothing will blow up the table dramatically because routes
do not get into the table unless they get past ISP filters.
An ISP with PoPs in 30 cities is free to announce all their
city level allocations to all their peers, and the peers are
free to ignore any prefixes that are longer than the 
city-level prefixes as issued by the RIR route registry.

--Michael Dillon