Jamie Baddeley wrote:
IX's and the like have accelerated IPv4 depletion. Discuss.
Only true to a limited extent. The real problem is that the minimum allocation sizes have been set artificially high to keep the size of the routing table down. If it had been possible to get /24s from the RIRs in recent years, I'd say a lot of multihomed sites wouldn't be sitting on large blocks of unused address space. I see the many more /24s finding their way into the routing table as organisations acquire unused blocks from others. It should have been possible a long time ago, but RIR rules have discouraged it. Like it or not, once the RIRs have no address space left to assign, a secondary market in address space will form, and it's up to the RIRs to figure out whether they're going to be involved in the process or not. Frankly, I don't think the size of the routing table is an excuse any more. Memory and processor horsepower are cheap. (Or should be. Someone should tell Cisco, whose long time habit of shipping routers with stupid memory configurations had a lot to do with carriers refusing to accept long prefixes, and therefore getting us into this mess.) -- don