Demon Internet Services provide an IP address for every dial-up
customer. Most other ISPs have taken the view that this is a waste
of valuable IP space and allocate IP addresses dynamically.
How should our industry respond to ISPs who behave selfishly and
do not take into account the good of the network?
Is it just selfish or do they have good reasons?
Dynamic address assignment and (static!) access
control don't go very well together, which could
be a reason for static address assignment.
Piet
Demon have spent a great deal of time and energy developing a
system which allows customers (who have individual IP addresses)
to dial in to any one of a number of PoPs and have their mail etc
automatically routed to them; the IP number is dynamically bound
to the particular modem they are coming in on at run time. They
are justifiably proud of this system. I believe that someone
from Demon has also pointed out that it is much more efficient
that the usual "class C per customer" approach, which assigns
256 addresses to half a dozen machines.
We strongly encourage our customers, most of whom are providers,
to use dynamic routing for dial up, but we can understand Demon's
situation ... and find it hard to condemn them when there are
so many more glaring examples of waste of IP address space.