I don't need to know the thousands of companies by name. I do know that one of my customers simply had no choice but to use real external addresses because of the requirements of the companies they connect to. I do know that two major automobile companies are involved, as well as several large corporations they do construction work for. In addition, there are over a hundred sub-contracting companies they connect to.
That may well be the case, but we can't stand for the public Internet's address space being depleted so that the someone else's private network can be simplified. Besides, if they don't intent to route it, then, under CIDR, which provider should they get their public addresses from?
That's fine. As long as they don't mind spending time and money renumbering their entire network once it gets connected to the internet.
That's my point. With real addresses, it addressed the issues of having to renumber when new business interconnections were made, or when any of them decided to get on the Internet. NAT was not viable then, as it is today.
They *will* have to renumber any time they change ISPs, or if they do not make their initial Internet connection to the same ISP from which they got addresses in the first place (not intending to route them publically at that time) -Phil