Subject: Re: IP network address assignments/allocations information?

From: "Perry E. Metzger" <[email-masked]>
Date: 02 Dec 1999 17:43:14 -0500

"Fleischman, Eric W" <[email-masked]> writes:
> 1) If we effectively ran out of addresses when RFC 1597 was
> published, has running out of addresses hurt us in any way?

I count "hurt" in dollars. The answer is yes. A client of mine just
spent millions of dollars because of our current broken
pseudo-internet in which everyone has to use private addressing 90% of
the time. None of this money would have been spent if end to end
addressing had been possible.

This expenditure doesn't count the constant maintenance nightmares
that layers of NATs have caused this particular client, and the
expenses coming from that.

Money is a nice, quantifiable kind of pain. From what I can tell, the
pain levels are very high. When your NAT nesting turns your simple
network restructuring into a multi-million dollar game of
pick-up-sticks, you're past the point where its ignorable.

Of course, as one provider told me at the DC IETF, in literally these
words, "NAT works just fine. Besides, customers are mostly there just
to spend money anyway."

Perry

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From: "Perry E. Metzger" <[email-masked]>
Date: 02 Dec 1999 17:43:14 -0500

Perry