I trust that some of you have seen this article from a while back: <http://moblog.wiredwings.com/archives/20110315/How-We-Killed-The-Internet-And-Nobody-Noticed.html> An informative except: "When I open my laptop, I see over ten different wifi access points. Say I wanted to send data to my friend in the flat next to mine. It is idiotic that nowadays, I would use the bottleneck subscriber line to my upstream ISP and my crippled upload speed and push it all the way across their infrastructure to my neighbors ISP and back to the Wifi router in reach of mine. The Internet is not meant to be used that way. Instead, all these wifi networks should be configured to talk to each other." I also trust that you are aware of what happened to the Internet in Egypt (and elsewhere) this spring, where Internet connectivity was disrupted by shutting down major ISP networks. I would like to bring the attention of the IETF to what I see as a fundamental problem with the current architecture of the Internet: The Internet is not a network. As part of the development of the Internet, fault-tolerant routing protocols have been developed that allow a connecdestined fortion to be maintained, even if the link that was carrying goes down, by routing packets around the problem. Similarly, packets can be load-balanced over multiple links for increased bandwidth. However, the benefits of these technologies are not available to end users. If I have a smartphone with both a 3G and a Wi-Fi connection, downloads cannot currently be load-balanced across them. The two interfaces are on two different networks, which are almost certainly part of two different autonomous systems. Packets must be addressed to one of the two interfaces, not the device, and packets addressed to one interface have no way to be routed to the other. Similar problems arise when a laptop has both a wired and a wireless connection. Wired networks also suffer from related difficulties: If I have Verizon and my friend has Comcast, and we string an Ethernet cable between our houses, packets for me will still all come down my connection, and packets for my friend will still all come down theirs. The Internet, as it currently appears to end-users, has a logical tree topology: computers connect to your home router, which connects to your ISP, which connects to the rest of the Internet. Cell phones connect to the tower, which connects through a backhaul link to the rest of the Internet. Almost all of the devices involved have multiple physical interfaces and full IP routing implementations, but only the default route is ever used. This results in a brittle Internet: the failure of one ISP router can disconnect a large number of end-users from the Internet, as well as interrupting communication between those users, even when those users are, physically, only a few feet from each other. My question is this: what IETF work would be needed to add more routing to the edges of the Internet? If each home or mobile device was essentially it's own autonomous system, what would this do to routing table size? To ASN space utilization? How can individuals interconnect home networks when RIRs do not assign address and AS number resources to individuals? How might individuals interconnect home networks without manual routing configuration? Under what circumstances could an ISP trust a client's claim to have a route to another client or to another ISP? How might packets sent to a device's address on one network be routed to that device's address on another network, while packets to immediately adjacent addresses take the normal path? _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf