The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has just allocated regional registries RIPE and APNIC a /8 each this month. For the uninitiated a /8 represents 2 to the power of 24 IP addresses or 167,77,216.
A /8 is the largest block allocation that can be made by IANA and these two have had the effect of bringing forward the x-date, the date for IPv4 exhaustion, by 5 months or so to April 30th 2011.
These blocks are subdivided into smaller subnets for further allocation to ISPs/organisations with smaller requirements such as BT and Timico. Timico has a variety of block allocations ranging from /16 to /20’s.
If you want to know more about IP addressing allocations check out wikipedia. The times they are a changing.
source [ trefor.net ]
