Allocation of IP Addresses

Thu Mar 14 06:00:24 UTC 1996

On Wed, 13 Mar 1996, Dorian Kim wrote:

> On Wed, 13 Mar 1996, Michael Dillon wrote:

> > Are you sure of this? Even if they start allocating out of the former 
> > Class A space?

> But that's not what you said. Given that Internic gets about 50-60 
> address requests a week, if you reserve /16 for each, you can do the 
> math. 

Math? What does math have to do with it? *grin*
Oh well, I guess there's some math there but I find it hard to believe 
that out of 50 address requests per week from ISP's there are more than 
10 that are truly clueful ISP's that absolutely need a /16 one year down 
the road.

There are still a *LOT* of people that think the Internic hands out 
portable addresses and startup ISP's are not much different from the 
general population in that regard.

Besides, the process of applying for an IP block is a lot like a 
negotiation. The newbie ISP presents their case as to why they know they 
will be mega-ISP Inc. a year down the road and absolutely must have that 
/16 block from the Internic. Then the Internic can counter and ask why 
they can't just use RFC 1918 addresses and run a NAT on their gateway. 
The ISP can plead poverty that they cannot afford to buy a PIX from Cisco 
and then the Internic can point out that a poverty-stricken ISP isn't 
likely to need a /16 and counter with a /23. And so on ........

> I guess this would force the deployment of IPv6 much sooner than 
> currently projected. 

It is by no means certain that IPv6 will ever be deployed. There are lots 
of ways to wring new life out of IPv4.

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