3 ms·
A lot of this is down to history. Way back when lots of these blocks were allocated, not only was IPV4 exhaustion a non-issue, but allocations were either in /1
by semi-extrinsic 11y ago
A lot of this is down to history. Way back when lots of these blocks were allocated, not only was IPV4 exhaustion a non-issue, but allocations were either in /16 or /8. So if 65 000 adresses (a /16) was too few, the next step up was 16 million.
- astrodust 11y agoThere was a time when simply having a .net domain, which was free to register, entitled you to a free Class B /16 allocation. If you were a company with any degree of credibility, it wasn't too hard to petition for a Class A allocation, /8. Apple and MIT managed. Then CIDR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing) came along and we had more than three sizes to offer, which really eased up on the crazy allocations. All those /8 allocations created chaos in the routing tables. Now they're usually sub-allocations from larger blocks which makes the routing tables much more orderly. Anything in the 192.x.x.x range was once called "the swamp" since it was full of so many routes.