On Fri, 31 Oct 1997, Peter Galbavy wrote:
I is *not* a waste. It is a very good use of IP address space. We have usage density of about 99% of our allocated blocks. Meanwhile the customers love it bcause they can do things that not having an IP address would stop. Their own domain name for a start - "snark.demon.co.uk" for my dial-up. Security based on IP address. We have many many busines users who use the fact that they know what IP address a dial-up user will have to authenticate access to their corporate networks.
We originally used static addresses for dialup customers. We requested more address space, and as part of the justification procedure I was told by Kim Hubbard that we had to use dynamic address assignments for anyone that was not connected 24/7. I used the same arguments, including that you can't get any more efficient that assigning a single /32 to a single host, but was told that in the days of address scarcity we couldn't afford such a use of address space. We changed everything to dynamic, and after now having 12x the number of customers, we are still using less space than we were. Until IPv6 is widely used and address space is not so critical, we have to conserve address space and using it wisely. Perhaps in the UK there are different requirements for allocation of address space than InterNIC/ARIN. John Tamplin Traveller Information Services jat@Traveller.COM 2104 West Ferry Way 205/883-4233x7007 Huntsville, AL 35801