Interop gives back a month’s worth of IPv4 addresses
Whenever we publish stories about the IPv4 address depletion or IPv6, people make comments along the lines of “does MIT really need a class A IPv4 block with 16,777,216 addresses?” Apparently Interop, the holder of the 45.x.x.x block since 1995, no longer needs that much space. They’re now returning 99 percent of it to ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers, which handles IP address distribution in North America. Interop is holding on to a small fraction of the 45/8 block that’s currently in active use.
As explained earlier this week, we’re now going through about one of these blocks of 16.78 million addresses per month, so this infusion extends the lifetime of the IPv4 address space by one month.