The Department of Work and Pensions, UK has an entire /8

Doug Barton dougb at dougbarton.us
Wed Sep 19 22:15:41 UTC 2012


Imagine that you are the DWP. You're given a block of addresses, told
that they will be yours forever, plan your network accordingly, and
implement your plan.

Now, decades later, people are telling you that "forever" is over, and
you have to totally re-address your network because you have something
that other people want.

To make the request that much more interesting, the reason that they
want your block is because they failed to implement the actual solution
to the problem, IPv6.

We were already looking at the IPv4 runout problems when I was at IANA
in 2004. We already knew (in large part thanks to folks like Tony Hain
and Geoff Huston) that we'd run out in the 2010-2012 time frame, and a
lot of us pushed a lot of rocks up a lot of hills to get our part of the
IPv6 infrastructure rollout done well in advance of that date.

We (and by we here I am explicitly including the RIRs) also heavily
discussed every single option for every single block ... holders of
legacy blocks were quietly approached and asked about the potential of
returning them, and some of them actually did. We scoured ERX space,
re-thought a lot of long held assumptions (e.g., we could never allocate
1/8); and squeezed every drop of blood we could from the IPv4 turnip. Of
course, this good work was continued long after I left ICANN, and the
Internet community should be grateful to those who have spent many
thankless hours dealing with this problem.

... and now, we're done. IPv4 is what it is. There are no new solutions,
there is no magic bullet, and no quantity of pixie dust is going to
cause new space to appear out of thin air. You can spend more time
flogging long-concluded arguments, or you can spend your time
productively by implementing IPv6.

Doug




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