Quote:
Originally Posted by Kushan
Each of those blocks has just over 16million usable IPs (16,777,214 I believe is the precise number), ranging from say 62.0.0.1 to 62.255.255.255. Now there are some lost in there, as you'd never give 62.0.0.1 to a customer and Virgin's own equipment will take up some, but 16million is a good place to start. Times that by 5 and you get roughly 80million IP addresses. That's a lot more than Virgin will ever need, even in the long term as there's just not that many people in the UK. So basically, Virgin won't run out any time soon and the move to IPv6 will be more about offering services and the ability to connect to non-IPv4 sites.
I believe they have so many IP's mostly due to the way Virgin was the culmination of various cable networks merging together over the years - NTL and Blueyonder, for example.
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That is a lot of IP addresses but not all ISP's are that lucky and its a bit of a waste to have that many as a lot of other ISP's are running short of IP addresses. Yes there aren't 80 million people in the UK but a lot of people use more than one IP and fair enough a lot of people won't use any...but I really think more should be done to start using IPv6 and this isn't just Virgin that is dragging their feet.