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Not as much as you think. There are only about 20 /8s owned by companies (and those companies are using those /8s for their networks!). Before IANA runout in 2
by Dagger2 7y ago
Not as much as you think. There are only about 20 /8s owned by companies (and those companies are using those /8s for their networks!).
Before IANA runout in 2011 we were going through one /8 every month; given that demand has only gone up since then, 20 /8s would be, what, a 12 month supply or so? v4 is just too small, and no amount of pushing allocations around is going to change that.
- nucleardog 7y agoWhile the addresses are largely in use (though I'd wager ham radio operators aren't using much of 44/8), are they really necessary? Does the UK Ministry of Defense actually have 16 million devices that need publicly routable addresses? Or could they be doing what almost everyone else is doing and using a handful of publicly routable addresses and private IP ranges behind them?
- Dagger2 7y agoNo, of course they're not necessary. They could turn off all their computers and then they wouldn't need any address space at all. But there are benefits to having networked computers, and there are benefits to doing that networking correctly and not paying the costs of NAT and overlapped address space. It would take them years to renumber off of their /8, at great cost and with the result of an increased ongoing operational cost, and for what benefit? That /8 would last the public internet for less than a month. It's not like the people who are yet to deploy v6 are suffering a lack of time, so buying them an extra month which they would then squander isn't going to be very helpful.