On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 05:56:42PM -0800, Geoff Joy wrote:
[...] My first plan was to dedicate bits in the address plan for geography/frequency and other factors but Brian talked me out of making any plan more complex than it already was. He also informed me of his reservation of the first 2 bits in the third octet for his use in future, something I was unaware of when I assumed the post. This made the CIDR mask 44.18.0.0/18 instead of the expected /16.
Yes, that was a time when we seemed to be growing subnets faster than expected and it looked like the original scheme I inherited was going to run out of space.
Nowadays I think we'll not need those two extra bits any time soon.
In retrospect I probably should have come up with a more equitable scheme for non-USA countries, but we have had enough space to allocate additional blocks when it became desireable to accomodate larger subnetting schemes.
Conversely, there are some allocations which are larger than the entire ham population of some countries. It's largely been a "seat of the pants" approach and is notably suboptimal in several cases. For that I apologize. - Brian