> Do these large companies really have 16,777,216 fans and chillers? Some of those might be regular servers or networking gear that are required to have IPv4 a

> Do these large companies really have 16,777,216 fans and chillers? Some of those might be regular servers or networking gear that are required to have IPv4 addresses for one reason or another. For example, they might need to interact with fans and chillers. > legacy allocation mistakes Requiring the same globally unique prefix for devices that share locations or functions would eat up allocations faster than the number devices would grow. But there are definitely good reasons for allocating addresses that way, just as there are probably good reasons why the number of ports on a switch isn't always a power of 2.