Allocation of IP Addresses

Thu Mar 14 06:09:40 UTC 1996

On Thu, 14 Mar 1996, David R. Conrad wrote:

> I don't see the point.  If you are going to propose using a reserved
> class A, why not use net 10?

The /16 would be reserved but not actually used. Then after a 
probationary period if the ISP shows that they deserve the /16, then they 
get to use it. If not, they lose it and have to continue running their 
NAT indefinitely. 

The /16's are reserved out of the old Class A space and nobody is 100% 
sure that those addresses can be safely sliced and diced into longer 
prefixes than /8. But this proposal ensures that when a /16 is released, 
the ISP already has a NAT system in place and if we find out that 
terrible things happen, they can just hook their NAT back up.

If it turns out that the old Class A is simply not globally usable, we 
can still allocate it to companies to use behind a NAT so that only the 
ISP's and NSP's need to deal with the mess on the global side.

Michael Dillon                                    Voice: +1-604-546-8022
Memra Software Inc.                                 Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com                             E-mail: michael at memra.com