Subject: Equal Access Working Group ...

From: "Francois D. Menard" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 17 Jul 1999 14:13:34 -0400 (EDT)

Fred, everyone,

I wonder if we should not have a new working group within the IETF that
would issue informational RFC's on the topics of equal access
using Internet Protocol technologies.

Here in Canada, there is a trend in the government mandating shared access
of the high speed Internet access facilities of the incumbent carriers.

This means that instead of mandating shared access to the spectrum, the
government seems to be increasingly satisfied with the incumbents offering
interfaces at Layer 3 to satisfy the pouding requests of the non-facility
based ISP's for a reasonable rate for a connection at the last mile.

Unfortunately, we are already facing a huge problem:

The CATV industry is lining up on variants of Source-Address-Looked
Routing (a.k.a policy routing in Cisco-land) (not to call it source
routing which seems to have more of a meaning for putting the path that
the packet should take in the header of the packet).  This isin't too
bad as long as the CATV operators are confident to be capable of 
implementing this in a scaleable manner.  So far, only Regional
Cablesystems of Sudbury/Timmins Ontario has done it and seems to
be satisfied with it.

The huge problem is that Bell Canada seems to have unilaterally 
decided to choose the hidious PPPoE solution for implementing
shared access of its monopoly on the last mile for high-speed
Internet access.

I am no expert at this, but my recent research demonstrates that 
looking at IP protocols from the angle of Equal Access makes you
think very differently.   Equal Access MPLS ... hmmm

I for one would like to see a serious effort on the part of the
IETF to make recommendations which would represent thorough concensus
from the part of IETF members.

For example, I would like to see a debate on the issue of the scalabiluty
of path selection according to the source address of the packet.  This
seems to me the only fair solution because it is the only one that would
route with information that is present on the simplest packet.  Routing
based on TOS, Tags or any other form of packet differentiation basically
implies that the person who is in control of the packet differentiation
has a bigger hammer than you.  And we're talking here of "equal access
routing".  Is is fair to say that source-looked routing is "fragile"
or "slow", with zillions of startups implementing fast paths based on
IP header information on a per packet basis ?

Pointers, ideas, anything ?

-=Francois=-

[email-masked]
514 761 5964

--
Francois D. Menard