Re: [Idr] WG LC on draft-ietf-idr-large-community-03.txt (10/17/2016 to 10/31/2016)

[Richard A Steenbergen <[e-mail]>]

Hello,

As a network operator, and a listed author on the "competing" wide BGP 
communities draft, I'd like to make a few comments.

At the time I originally got involved in helping to create a "better" BGP 
community implementation (around 2010, IIRC), we were facing the rather 
serious problem that when 16-bit ASNs ran out, there was no good mechanism 
for 32-bit speakers to use BGP communities in the way we've all come to 
know and love on the Internet. 

Quite frankly, my involvement with that draft wasn't because I in any way 
considered it to be the best solution, but because I thought we needed to 
do SOMETHING, and I didn't want to see something that had zero ACTUAL 
operator vetting get rolled out. I got very busy with other things in life 
(being the CTO of a Tier 1, launching a new startup, etc), so admittedly 
this issue fell off my radar (and as an owner of many 16-bit ASNs, it was 
never really something that affected me personally anyways :P), but I am 
absolutely appalled to see that the state of affairs has not changed since 
then. This is disgraceful in a way that only the IETF is capable of 
delivering, and I feel very sorry for the poor networks who are trying to 
get off the ground today in a 32-bit ASN world with issues like this still 
outstanding.

Having reviewed the current state of both proposals, I am now a firm 
supporter of the large communities draft, and wish to remove my support 
and authorship from the wide communities draft. This is the simple, 
effective, and not overly convoluted solution we need, and I'm glad that 
someone is actually taking the time and energy to get it fixed once and 
for all.

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <[e-mail]>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)