3 ms·

Regardless of whether or not they are using all of the addresses, they probably find it easier to continue holding onto them for future needs and convenience th

Regardless of whether or not they are using all of the addresses, they probably find it easier to continue holding onto them for future needs and convenience than to give any of them up for short term gain. IT Departments hate having to manage these sorts of changes. Imagine all of the firewall rules that might have to be updated if suddenly part of a /8 range was to be considered "external".

there 16y ago
i think arin/iana will have to start doing audits and make these companies justify their continued use of their entire /8s or else have to give parts of them back. ip addresses aren't owned, they're just leased from arin and companies have to pay yearly fees of thousands of dollars to keep using them. arin has gotten pretty strict on giving out additional space to ISPs asking for further allocations due to the pool shortage. once the pool runs dry, the only thing they'll be able to do is break up previous allocations into smaller ones. these companies with /8s only have them because they were given out in the mid '80s, not because they've ever shown a need for 16 million host addresses.
- djcapelis 16y ago
  ip addresses aren't owned, they're just leased from arin and companies have to pay yearly fees of thousands of dollars to keep using them. The legacy blocks were never owned by ARIN. It is unclear whether they have any right to claim anything over them. IANA may have rights to claim ownership, ARIN definitely does not. ARIN is merely one of five RIRs that ask for addresses from IANA.
- rmc 16y ago
  Before CIDR it was all class A, B or C addresses. Big companies probably needed a few sites and subnets so they needed a class A
- Hoff 16y ago
  Play that idea through. Where do you end up, when can you get there, and will the results be worth it? With major businesses that have their networks disrupted (Halliburton, HP, GE, IBM, Apple, etc), with the router and firewall and server and client and NAT reconfigurations, and a whole pile of administrative repercussions and squabbles from any revocation certain, where the sections of the blocks won't be available until after the businesses are able to clear the subnets, and how long will those recovered IP addresses delay the inevitable? Wave a magic wand and recall, say, five US DoD /8 blocks back. (Something which will not happen, but we will assume for the moment that US DoD is on the front edge of IPv6 adoption.) How long will those five /8 blocks delay the exhaustion? And how much of that consolidation effort will detract from rolling out IPv6 and 6to4 tunnels and NAT64 deployment? Is the cost of all that effort and disruption worth it?

there 16y ago

i think arin/iana will have to start doing audits and make these companies justify their continued use of their entire /8s or else have to give parts of them back. ip addresses aren't owned, they're just leased from arin and companies have to pay yearly fees of thousands of dollars to keep using them. arin has gotten pretty strict on giving out additional space to ISPs asking for further allocations due to the pool shortage. once the pool runs dry, the only thing they'll be able to do is break up previous allocations into smaller ones. these companies with /8s only have them because they were given out in the mid '80s, not because they've ever shown a need for 16 million host addresses.

djcapelis 16y ago
ip addresses aren't owned, they're just leased from arin and companies have to pay yearly fees of thousands of dollars to keep using them. The legacy blocks were never owned by ARIN. It is unclear whether they have any right to claim anything over them. IANA may have rights to claim ownership, ARIN definitely does not. ARIN is merely one of five RIRs that ask for addresses from IANA.
rmc 16y ago
Before CIDR it was all class A, B or C addresses. Big companies probably needed a few sites and subnets so they needed a class A
Hoff 16y ago
Play that idea through. Where do you end up, when can you get there, and will the results be worth it? With major businesses that have their networks disrupted (Halliburton, HP, GE, IBM, Apple, etc), with the router and firewall and server and client and NAT reconfigurations, and a whole pile of administrative repercussions and squabbles from any revocation certain, where the sections of the blocks won't be available until after the businesses are able to clear the subnets, and how long will those recovered IP addresses delay the inevitable? Wave a magic wand and recall, say, five US DoD /8 blocks back. (Something which will not happen, but we will assume for the moment that US DoD is on the front edge of IPv6 adoption.) How long will those five /8 blocks delay the exhaustion? And how much of that consolidation effort will detract from rolling out IPv6 and 6to4 tunnels and NAT64 deployment? Is the cost of all that effort and disruption worth it?