On Dec 28, 2017, at 4:31 PM, Thomas Bellman <bellman@nsc.liu.se <mailto:bellman@nsc.liu.se>> wrote:
Similarly, an ISP that wants a structured address plan, e.g. to encode prefecture, city and part of city in the address, will quickly use up bits in the customer id part of the address.
Telephone numbers are a prime example of a type of “structured address plan”. Or, at least, they were. Now we have number portability. The main structural boundary is a country code. Region codes in the US (Area codes) apply across several networks. In some countries, the region code is [landline|cellular] and still applies across several vendors. This is an example of overloading a token with non-functional meanings better left to a well maintained database. If one insists on overloading an IP address with extra meanings, not common with any other deployment, the end result may well be confusion rather than ease of management.