North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: The Choice: IPv4 Exhaustion or Transition to IPv6
Kevin Oberman wrote: From: Stephen Wilcox <[email protected]>Some of it, but a large part of the "missing" space belongs to the US There's another set of missing space, here. It seems to be the elephant in the room. While I can't (or won't) speak to the routing issues mentioned in the thread, I wonder that no one has brought up all the legacy space that is held by a few large conglomerates. No, I'm not talking about AT&T, here. I refer to the early days, when class B networks were handed out like penny candy, and when organizations could get class C space equivalent to a class B. When Company A has, say, 5 or 6 of those, and then acquires Company B, and then C and D, and all of them have that same allotment, it becomes a non-trivial amount of space. If there's really only 5 or 6 big companies, where there used to be 50 or so, we are suddenly talking about a non-trivial amount of space. Unfortunately, there's no good way to make them give it up. When you can see that they could easily make do with a single /8 (or less), it's rather sad that we don't have a mechanism in place that punishes for greed, and rewards for surrender of unused (or at least completely unnecessary) space. I only know about the industry I came from, of course, and I suspect that the lion's share of over-allocation is in it. I rather doubt that such things as banking, which came late to the table, have that characteristic. I know it's not a permanent answer, but it seems that (unlike the black space over on milnet et al) there's a temporary reprieve to exhaustion in there somewhere. -- The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it. Niccolo Machiavelli
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