On Tue, 19 Nov 1996, Bill Sommerfeld wrote:
Even the private, behind the scenes, allocations made by the IANA, such as the @Home allocation which was not made based on SWIP information. How could it be? They did not even have customers, just a lot of venture capital and the "right" people on their staff.
Regardless of whether the skids were greased on this allocation, the result is the right way to go..
As a definite outsider to all this, it looks like much of 24/8 has been given out in /16../14 sized chunks to various cable operators, with lots of space in between them (some of them have room to expand to a /10 or /11...).
The cable companies *do* have customers; they aren't IP customers (yet), but they *are* customers, and no doubt the cable providers have been able to demonstrate how many of their customers already have computers and access to the internet via modem and are thus realistic customers for the ip-over-cable system..
I still look forward to a future where every home has an IP address and I thought cable internet access would bring that. However, up here in Canada a new service from the cable companies is soon going to move to a dynamic addressing system. The first reason they told me was that there isn't enough IP space in the world. Is it such a problem for them to purchase more IP space? There is room for expansion in 24, so as far as I can tell if they expect more customers than they have IP space for, they could purchase that space, correct? An article I wrote about the current problems with this new cable-modem service is located at: http://www.magi.com/~bill/linenoiz/LineNoiz-release-3.1.txt -- Billy Biggs ae687@freenet.carleton.ca