Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!yale!cmcl2!phri!roy
From: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Running out of Internet addresses?
Message-ID: <3614@phri.UUCP>
Date: 25 Nov 88 14:56:57 GMT
Organization: Public Health Research Institute, NYC, NY
Lines: 19


	Has anybody made any serious estimates of how long it will be
before we run out of 32-bit IP addresses?  (Silly question; I'm sure a very
great amount of thought has been given to it by many people.)  With the
proliferation of such things as diskless workstations, each of which has
its own IP address (not to mention terminal multiplexors which eat up one
IP address per tty line!), it seems like it won't be too long before we
just plain run out of addresses.

	Yes, I know that 2^32 is a hell of a big number, but it seems like
we won't get anywhere near that number of assigned addresses before we
effectively run out because most nets are sparsely populated.  My little
bit of wire, for example, has 256 allocated addresses yet I'm only actually
using 30 or so.
-- 
Roy Smith, System Administrator
Public Health Research Institute
{allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers}!phri!roy -or- phri!roy@uunet.uu.net
"The connector is the network"