Class D addresses? was: Redploying most of 127/8 as unicast public

[Jay Hennigan <jay () west net>]

On 11/20/21 11:01, Michael Thomas wrote:

> There is just as big a block of addresses with class D addresses for 
> broadcast. Is broadcast really even a thing these days? I know tons of 
> work went into it, but it always seemed that brute force and ignorance 
> won out using unicast. Even if it has some niche uses, I seriously doubt 
> that it needs 400M addresses. If you wanted to reclaim ipv4 addresses it 
> seems that class D and class E would be a much better target than loopback.

It's multicast, not broadcast. A very small chunk is used by some 
routing protocols and it has uses in several streaming applications, but 
indeed it's much larger than it practically needs to be.

However, IMNSHO, all of these proposals if adopted are really just going 
to make a few people richer in the short term after their adoption and 
will not do anything significant to solve the problem of IPv4 exhaustion 
long-term.

--
Jay Hennigan - jay () west net
Network Engineering - CCIE #7880
503 897-8550 - WB6RDV