Lloyd Wood writes:
Telephone numbers are not equivalent to IP
addresses (although you say they are), and
it's a long time since actual telephone numbers
have been used for hierarchical routing.
They are more similar than different, certainly enough so for the purposes of
the vulgarization I provide. No other commonplace technology seems to provide
so appropriate an analogy.
I don't remember mentioning hierarchical routing in my vulgarization.
You can't have efficient address-based routing
and efficient (sequential) assignment of the same
addresses in the same space without severely
constraining the growth of your network - and the
telephone network does not.
Sure you can, with variable address spaces, and the telephone network does just
that.