Meanwhile, despite heavy use of NAT, the available IPv4 address space
seems to be disappearing. How do you propose solving this problem?
The obvious answer is to charge people for IP addresses rather than the
current system of giving them away for free.
I'm convinced that lots of companies have loads more IP addresses than they
really need. In the early days of the ARPANet/Internet, class A addresses
were given to anyone who wanted them. I'm sure all those addresses aren't
needed, but obviously the people who have them want to keep them since
there's no reason for them not to,
Eg, I picked a number at random - 52.0.0.0/8. This is owned by 'dupont.com'
who I'm sure are a wonderful company, but they 'only' have 85000 employees
- why on earth do they need 16M IP addresses, even if each employee has 10
PCs they've still got 15.9M spare addresses? They aren't an ISP so they
aren't giving the addresses to other people. There are other similar examples.
But if you start charging $10 per year per IP address, then anyone with a
class A address who doesn't need it will give it back sharpish! (or even $1
per year will still be $16M per year for a class A range..)
(Or maybe this is just me being naive...)
Paul VPOP3 - Internet Email Server/Gateway
paul(_at_)pscs(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk http://www.pscs.co.uk/