On 5-aug-2005, at 0:09, Christopher L. Morrow wrote:
2. We know cable companies, dsl providers and mobile companies can use this many IPs, but they generally seem to make use of NAT and IPv6. If everyone in this category who could justify a /8 applied and received them we might be in real trouble with our IPv4 space.
Actually, I think it'd be GOOD if the v4 space got very scarce very fast... it'd make people stop putzing around with v6 amd mae it production for real. (perhaps even someone would think about how to multihome in v6? in a workable manner)
The first six months of this year nearly 100 million addresses were given out by the RIRs. (How many were returned I don't know.) With some 1100 - 1200 million lying around the IANA storage facility unused, this gives us some 5 years before we run out of _unused_ address space, if nothing changes. Even if there is significant growth, it's virtually impossible for those billion+ addresses to run out within 3 years. Five years is a long time, you can upgrade a lot of load balancers in such a period. You can upgrade a good number in three years, too.