Subject: Re: Resolving geo discussions

From: "J. Noel Chiappa" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2003 11:59:02 -0400

> From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>

    > There's no doubt that if you can persuade all the upstream ISPs to do
    > the right thing, and persuade all the local downstream ISPs to do the
    > right thing, the IX-based addressing model can help a lot (and can
    > simply use PA space as if it was PI). But I don't think the economic
    > forces involved will exercise the required persuasion.

As an aside, and also in tune with your comment, people might want to note
that getting addresses from a local exchange (what I used to call a
"cooperative exchange point") has a big advantage, which is that you're not
tied to a single supplier; i.e. it's effectively number portability, as the
exchange can switch members in the set of carriers providing service without
anyone renumbering.

Of course, if you decide you're unhappy with the exchange, and want to leave,
then you are stuck! :-)

Also, this may lead ISP's to decide that they'd rather not support exchanges,
since the customers are less locked-in (q.v. your comments about economic
forces)! However, I'd imagine that if the exchange is big enough, and there
are enough competing carriers, some carrier(s) will decide they'd rather have
less-locked-in business, than no business at all. After all, plenty of markets
operate without this level of lock-in.

	Noel

---

From: Tim Chown <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2003 17:15:40 +0100

> exchange can switch members in the set of carriers providing service without

That is the plus, and what I understand Euro6IX is investigating.
 
> Of course, if you decide you're unhappy with the exchange, and want to leave,

Well, there are only so many exchanges in any big city :)   But if you
can arrange to stay with the same exchange, your chances of retaining
your address block from that exchange are higher.

> operate without this level of lock-in.

Hopefully someone on the network modelling side of Euro6IX can comment.

Tim

---

From: Sean Doran <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2003 03:32:20 +0100

Noel -

> Also, this may lead ISP's to decide that they'd rather not support 

Too late.  It has been many years since there has been any exchange in
the world with anything close to universal participation.   The 
paragraph
at the end of your message is thus not imagination but clairvoyance.

> since the customers are less locked-in

No, there are bigger problems ranging from whether the exchange operator
is vaguely competent now (let alone dealing with scale) to which of 
several
local exchange operators you want to pay to connect to (they aren't 
charities,
and they compete in places like London, Frankfurt and Paris), to which
of my customers is really likely to announce the exchange-related 
address
space in its entirety to me, given the trickiness of recovering the 
money they
pay me for the traffic this attracts from their competitors who also 
attach to
the exchange point.

If you believe in customer lock-in, then you are so out of touch with 
the market
in competitive places like Europe that I'd like to introduce you to 
several
people who would love to sell you their phenomenally successful due to 
customer
lock-in PA-address-using ISPs at low low extra value prices.  :-)

Site renumbering *is* a pain, but it's a pain a site might only have to 
do once
or maybe twice annually, given typical transit contract lengths, and 
there are
various ugly technologies that make the job easier.   (If I mention 
NAT, though,
I fear someone will seriously bruise his knees...)

Back to your neck of the woods, i.e., market-free theory :-)  -- what 
do you
think of three axes to describe the problem we're looking at:  the 
frequency
of the start renumbering, the  amount / clustering of renumbering 
things,
and the time to complete the renumbering process?    This could describe
a site changing providers annually, a laptop switching between different
wireless  networks,  or a "Schroedinger's network" that is 'stuck' in a
long renumbering process that ends only when a network connection 
fails, and
begins again when the connection recovers, among other things, and
has been an interesting thinking instrument for me.

	Sean.