Simon, That's what CIDR is all about; the geographical allocation of addresses/prefixes at the point of Internet connectivity for the purposes of aggregation. If there is no sanity in address allocation, we cannot solve the problem. - paul At 01:15 AM 2/13/96 +0000, Simon Chan wrote:

The unfortunate requirement of such scheme to work is that all address space allocated to the small ISP's has to be contiquous so that it could be aggregated to a larger prefix under an autonomous system. Given the completely arbitrary manner adopted by the Internic's address allocation policy, (eg. 4 C's to ISP A, skip a few C's, 8 C's to ISP B where A and B can be 4,000 miles apart) it is safe to assume that the small chunks of C class addresses are geographically dispersed throughout the States with many holes still unassigned or unaccounted for. If you are talking about swamp, this is it. However, a survey for how those chunks of address got broken up into many different places perhaps can help in the direction of finding such solution. If these small IP pieces can be grouped together according to their geographic locations, there is chance that some broken chunks may be pieced together to form large enough piece by pure luck. If such solution exists, I am sure someone would be interested in forming such regional consortiums to help salvage the once lost IP addresses.