Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
one" and then it levels off again. The question is: where on the S are we now? There is something to be said for high (close to leveling off) because pretty much anyone who wants/needs IP in North America and Europe has it, but maybe we're still quite low, since lots of stuff that could benefit from IP connectivity is still standalone. (And then there's the rest of the world, of course.)
I think we'll have a "double S". Almost all residential broadband providers here (.fi) have changed their policy from allocating 10/8 addresses and NATting the tens of thousands of subscribers to the outside to automatically allocating public IP's with DHCP. Total consumption in order of a few hundred thousand addresses for our small country alone.
The problem is not so much address space (you can run a fortune 500 company behind a single address with NAT) but routing. This is still a big problem in IPv6 (as we're hoping to avoid the mess that is IPv4), but I think we're getting closer to a solution.
Private address space is a pain if you have to redo company boundaries. Merging two or three businesses who all used the first subnets of 10/8 takes a lot of unneccessary extra hardware. Pete