IPv4 Address Range Shortage Inquiry

We need an addressing system for the next 5 billion people and 10 billion devices. 0.3 billion IP addresses, even if it were reasonable to salvage them (it isn't), is already not enough.

And really these should be counted in ranges, not individual IP addresses. A couple hundred thousand /22s isn't nearly enough to give every small business provider independent space.

240.0.0.0/4 and 127.0.0.0/8 are intended to be not routable nor globally reachable. Convincing billions of IP devices globally that this has changed is an enormous, impossible effort that will break things. As a small example of this exercise, try in a test lab to carve up 127.0.0.0/8 space, advertise it to hosts, and attempt to get it forwarded.

Why not implement IPv6, if touching every IP node anyway? /64s for every subnet puts many times the size of the entire IPv4 address space into each LAN. Makes counting addresses obsolete. Unused address space, so no conflicts to sort out.