Allocations for "always-on" ISPs

NAT is your friend - very few home users need real IP addresses.


> Hi!
> With the advent of technologies like ADSL and Ethernet to the home, several new ISP in Europe are starting to offer "always on" Internet access.
> The allocation strategies vary, if they give a subnet to each household this is usually a /29, if they group more than one household in each subnet the average IPv4 address consumption by each household can be a little less.
> In any case they need a lot of addresses, i.e. a few millions.
> Can someone help me to see if what I think it would happen is correct?
> 1) they request address space to RIPE, with a nicely written documentation that clearly shows that they need millions of addresses
> 2) nonetheless they won't receive more than a /20 to begin with
> 3) when they have used more than 80% of this /20, and can prove it,  another one will be assigned, most likely not contiguous
> 4) and so on and so forth, at a very fast pace,  until they will have a very fragmented address space
> Is this correct ?
> Is it safe to assume that if they start using public address, where really needed, they will always receive new allocations if they can prove they need it until IPv4 addresses last ?
> Is there any way to reduce the address space fragmentation due to new non contiguous allocations ?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> bruno
> 
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