PI vs PA Address Space

>                         This keeps the  number
>                         of  routes  in  the  interdomain  routing system at an
>                         acceptable level. The number of aggregated  routes  is
>                         much  lower  than  the  number that would be needed if
>                         each  end-site's  individual  routes  would need to be
>                         propagated throughout the  whole  interdomain  routing
>                         system.

	"Acceptable level"
	Hints at a technological weakness in current router hardware.
	May also be related to route propgation latencies.

>                         The reason for this arrangement is  the  load  on  the
>                         interdomain  routing system.  If the customer used the
>                         address space assigned to and  aggregatable  by  their
>                         previous  service  provider when connecting to another
>                         service provider, their routing information could  not
>                         be  aggregated  and  would have to be propagated sepa-
>                         rately throughout the whole interdomain  routing  sys-
>                         tem.

	Again, hints at a technological weakness in current router hardware.
	May also be related to route propgation latencies.  At no point does
	this address the scaling problems that IPv6 (or followons) will
	bring.  (There are some who will retire before we need a replacment
	for IPv4, but I'm not one of them)


>                         At the time of this writing there is  growing  concern
>                         among  the  operators of major transit routing domains
>                         in the Internet that the number of  individual  routes
>                         and  their  associated  information  is growing faster
>                         than the deployed routing technology will be  able  to
>                         handle.  Parts  of  the interdomain routing system are
>                         already operating at capacity.
> 
>                         It  has  been  argued  that  PI addresses will quickly
>                         become be totally useless since the  Internet  routing
>                         system will not be able to support them any longer.

	A very clear indication that there is a problem in router technology.
> 
>                         Consequently  it  has been suggested that the regional
>                         IRs should immediately stop allocating  and  assigning
>                         PI  space  and  only  allocate  PA  space  to  service
>                         providers.

	So there is the suggestion that policies be created/enforced to 
	accomodate problem routing technology?  Is this really what we
	want to do?

--bill