[CUWiN] accept FreeNetworks peering agreement?

[Stephane Alnet]

Hi Dave,

> I think C-U Wireless should get on board FreeNetworks by accepting
> their Peering Agreement.  Anybody disagree?

I must be missing the whole point of FreeNetworks. :(

It seems to me that the different networks are not directly 
interconnected and that they all use the Internet to interconnect. 
Doing IPv4 tunneling in an NxN fashion is known to not scale properly 
(difficult to manage, unstable).

Secondly, the mention of BGP seems superfluous. BGP can be used to 
announce peering policies, but this is obviously not the purpose here 
since the requirements are for "free transit" (which would need to be 
defined in BGP terms, BTW). BGP can also be used to announce routes in 
a limited fashion, but if people are going to have to configure 
point-to-point tunnels and register their RFC1918 address blocks 
centrally anyway, this is of limited interest. Overall, the fact that 
FreeNetworks doesn't provide a BGP server to peer with (which could 
justify the existence of the whole thing, the same way FreeWorldDialup 
provides a SIP proxy server to register with) seems to indicate that 
the designers of the project are quite "unclear on the concept" of BGP 
peering.

As a sidenote, having to "register" RFC1918 blocks in a /16 fashion 
won't get a lot of people onboard so limits over time the scalability & 
interest of the idea.
[Asking people to publicly register private space doesn't give the 
project a lot of points on my chart either.]


More importantly, beyond the technical details, I'm missing how 
"end-networks" are going to be able to provide any kind of "transit" 
anyhow.


This looks to me more like a "ah-ah, that BGP thing looks really 
cool"-moment turned into a couple websites, but with little thinking 
behind it about what interconnecting disparate networks really means 
and how to build it properly.
S.


PS: If the folks at FreeNetworks had mentioned things like MPLS I may 
have been impressed, but not this time.