[e2e] a means to an end

[David P. Reed]

I was referring to a different possibility thinking from the viewpoint 
of a "network over networks" that provides connectivity among IP 
end-hosts:  there is no reason not to have a number of competing routing 
systems all sharing (agreeing to) the same IP (v4 or v6) address space, 
at a planetary scale.  That could be done by using LSR or GRE or 
tunneling to get from and endpoint to the first hop router of its chosen 
routing system.

Today's "tunnel broker" system for IPv6 actually looks a bit like that - 
it competes with the "standard" IPv4 routing to get to a subset of the 
same endpoints.   And a corporate "intranet" also looks like that, 
approximately.  But I am talking about a "public" not a "private" Internet.

Fred Baker wrote:
>
> On Nov 9, 2008, at 11:05 AM, David P. Reed wrote:
>> I'm completely confused by the suggestions from Fred and Noel that
>> 802.11 802.1, MPLS are somehow competing with the current IP routing
>> system.  None of those are end-to-end solutions, ...
>
> Depends on your viewpoint. There are those that think of them as end 
> to end solutions in some stated domain. In Beijing during the last 
> week of October I visited a school that literally was proposing 
> MPLS-on-Ethernet as an end-to-end solution.
>
> The reason I mentioned them is this. You noted that the Internet was 
> designed as a network of networks, and IP was the ring to bind them. 
> True enough. We have two variations on that in the present Internet. 
> One is that we literally have separate networks connected through a 
> collection of backbone networks, often by means of network address 
> translators or other gateways. The other is that the IP protocol 
> usually runs atop some lower layer (what I call "intranet", what 
> others inexplicably call "layer 2") networks, including various 
> extended LAN, circuit switch, and virtual circuit networks.
>
> To my way of thinking, whether you mean this in an infrastructure 
> sense, and administrative sense, or a routing protocol sense, the 
> Internet is very much a network of networks.
>
>> Is the confusion between the limited scope of 802.11 and 802.16 and the
>> planet-scale scope of IP addressing really prevalent among the 
>> community?
>>
>> Maybe this explains why so many seem to confuse the hardware and cabling
>> with networking.   KInd of like confusing the Intel instruction set with
>> the Win32 API, or confusing the workings of the marketplace with the
>> resolution of social issues.
>>
>> Fred Baker wrote:
>>>
>>> On Nov 9, 2008, at 4:31 AM, David P. Reed wrote:
>>>
>>>> why not multiple competing "routing" layers?
>>>
>>> We have those, in spades. Consider 802.11, 802.1, 802.16, ATM and 
>>> its predecessors, etc.
>>>
>>
>
>