On Tue, 5 Jun 2012, Bjorn Pehrson wrote:
Splitting up the address space by delegations of smaller chunks to commercial service providers with different AS-numbers and policies will lead to a historical mistake.
I would see the choice between using local AS numbers for the announcements (be it commercial or non-commercial) vs. using a single AS "just" a technical detail about the future network design.
The policy issue is a separate thing, and the delegation agreements and policies can be quite the same, regardless of the technical solution to do the announcements.
1: Do we wish to allow a larger amount of sites (like, one per country, or more) to locally announce their prefixes on the Internet? Ok, allow them to announce their delegations from whatever local AS the local network admins have access to, possibly reusing existing routers and peering agreements, just adding the prefix to the routing policies. It's quite lightweight to set up (at least, it would be for us here) and can be done incrementally (some sites can set it up while the others keep on doing what has been done before). I would imagine us announcing Finland (44.139/16), routing it to RF, and tunneling it locally to other local gateways.
2: Or do we wish to go for a smaller amount of sites (less than one per country) announcing the whole 44/8 to reduce load and dependence on UCSD? Ok, get an AS, routers to run it at those sites, arrange IGP connectivity within the AS (probably tunnels again), and innovate tunneling solutions to distribute traffic further from those points to the end users. I don't see the intra-AS (IGP) connectivity happening without tunnels any time soon - availability of long-range high-bandwidth radio links would require pretty advanced innovation.
It's possible to do both of those. AS for AMPRnet to do the /8 announcements from more than one site, and local announcements for those sites who wish to have traffic routed from the Internet directly to the site / country without passing one of the AMPRnet AS routers / tunnel brokers.
- Hessu, OH7LZB