> One compromise might be for the provider to reserve a block which can > re-used by more than one customer, but that block will still consume a > chunk of the provider's space. Don't you think that this would be asking for trouble in the event that the customer does eventually connect? It would be best to have the customer with a "legal" network from the start. No, since the customers in question have explicitly stated that the network numbers will be used for their private networks, which will, for policy reasons, not be reachable from the Internet. They would use the new network numbers with the explicit caveat that IP addresses assigned from them would NEVER be routed to the Internet, so they would have to re-configure any such hosts if they later needed Internet access. The issue here is how should we deal with private networks which run TCP/IP but which are not intended to be part of the global Internet address space. Given the very finite size of the IPv4 address space, it is silly to assign network numbers to systems which are never intended to be a part of the global Internet. This issue was first raised long ago, but recent growth of the Internet has made it more important that we come up with a policy for dealing with unconnected networks. --Vince