Kevin Oberman wrote:
From: Stephen Wilcox <steve.wilcox@packetrade.com>
I wasnt specifically thinking of reclamation of space, I was noting a couple of things:
- that less than 50% of the v4 space is currently routed. scarcity will presumably cause these non-routed blocks to be: :- used and routes :- reclaimed and reassigned :- sold on
Some of it, but a large part of the "missing" space belongs to the US Government, mostly the military. It is very much in use and is routed carefully such that it does not show up in the public Internet.
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