Europe hits old internet address limits
Found on BBC News on Saturday, 15 September 2012
From now on, companies can only make one more application for IPv4 addresses and, if successful, will only get 1,024 of them.
On 14 September Ripe NCC got down to its last 16 million IPv4 addresses. While this might sound a lot, said Mr Pawlik, the use of this last substantial block would be so heavily restricted that the supply could be considered to be at an end.
Other techniques based around technical tricks that share IPv4 addresses among many different devices would prove increasingly unworkable, he said.
Or the RIPE could demand some address blocks back from those who already do have millions, instead of bugging many medium and small IT companies. The DoD alone manages eleven /8 netblocks, or 184,549,376 IP addresses. AT&T and Level3 have also two /8 blocks each. There's also the question why other companies have entire /8 blocks, like Bell, Daimler, DuPont, Eli Lilly, Ford, GE, Halliburton, HP, Prudential Securities and Xerox. If those handful clean up and shrink their address spaces, IPv4 could easily last for many more years.