RE: GPS info in IP addresses

[JohnM <[e-mail]>]

Tony,

	Thank you for your careful and accurate assessment of my proposal.  I
believe you are right: Since it has become _painfully_ clear that
geographic information cannot be used for routing yet (perhaps ever),
the question then arises, why place it in the IP address at all? Your
suggestion, then, that it could/should be a service placed at a higher
layer is becoming more pertinent. 

That you see the usefulness of such information in the industry has
caused me to appreciate your response, and your perspective.  

Therefore, I would like to further this (collaborative) effort with
others who would find this dialogue valuable, but not in an
inapporopriate list, as this one appears to be.  Tony, do you have any
suggestions as to the establishment of, or the existence of, a group
that is furthering the notion that geographic information about computer
equipment and other internet devices will be useful knowledge to have?

Once again, thanks.
>----------
>From: 	Tony Li[SMTP:[e-mail]]
>Sent: 	Friday, August 16, 1996 1:32 PM
>To: 	[e-mail]
>Cc: 	JohnM; [e-mail]; [e-mail]; [e-mail];
>[e-mail]; [e-mail]; [e-mail]; [e-mail];
>[e-mail]
>Subject: 	Re: GPS info in IP addresses
>
>
>[inappropriate mailing lists elided...]
>
>   > The benefit of placing geographic information in the IP address, despite
>   > the fact that we cannot (yet) use this info for routing, is that various
>   > network devices will be locatable within a physical space.  This will be
>   > a real benefit for people trying to locate devices that need service,
>   > etc. in a large network.  No protocol to date provides such information.
>
>   Er, there are resource records defined in the DNS for exactly this
>   purpose.  Having the geographical coordinates imbedded within the
>   network-level address doesn't seem to be a particularlly good fit for
>   this particular application.
>
>In fact, the resource records are _inappropriate_ for this because of the
>dynamic nature of the location information.  And using the IP address is
>even less appropriate.  We need those bits, thank you very much.
>
>However, location IS a very valuable bit of information, both for network
>management purposes of static equipment, for general tracking of mobile
>equipment, and for just being nosy about where your neighbors house
>_really_ is.  It would make sense to be able to extract this information
>from a system using a TCP/UDP "small service" which returns a GPS location
>string.  I would suggest that someone who is interested in this (and I can
>think of at least one major router vendor who has the necessary GPS
>information available), I suggest that someone develop the protocol and
>then write the RFC.
>
>Tony
>
>p.s. I prefer a binary representation of the information.  However, if you
>decide to do an ASCII representation, please be rigourous about the syntax
>as folks WILL write parsers to it...
>