On Tue, 13 Feb 1996, Simon Chan wrote:
unaccounted for. If you are talking about swamp, this is it. However, a survey for how those chunks of address got broken up into many different places perhaps can help in the direction of finding such solution. If these small IP pieces can be grouped together according to their geographic locations, there is chance that some broken chunks may be pieced together to form large enough piece by pure luck. If such solution exists, I am sure someone would be interested in forming such regional consortiums to help salvage the once lost IP addresses.
I don't believe it requires "pure luck." I would hope that a group of individuals would be able to convince the InterNIC into delegating a /16, in return for either an equal amount of smaller CIDR blocks or somewhere in the neighborhood. If some of those smaller delegations happened to be continguous, the InterNIC would then have the responsibility and option of turning them into a larger block or simply re-delegating them out to new organizations at their discretion. Small providers are the ones that tend to have the smaller CIDR blocks (/18 and above). If a number of these organizations were to "join" together using an exchange point mechanism, with multiple long-haul carriers connecting (e.g. NSPs) to a single point, you could achieve a good level of aggregation. For example, rather than the "Internet," having to deal with 8, /19 announcements, the rest of the world would see a single /16 announcement. Wow, so we just do this in a few hundred places and you've lowered the overall routing table by 8 * N(hundred). The main problem, as we all know, is this isn't a stable marketplace. Not only is there fierce competition for staff, but also for customers. Why would a number of small providers want join together? -jh-