🚀 go-pugleaf

Peter Chant <pete@petezilla.co.uk> wrote:
>
>What are the advantages for an ISP in providing dynamic IP's? Does it 
>mean they give customers addresses from the private network address range
>and masquerade, or do they just allocate dynamically a small pool of IP
>numbers?

The latter, usually.  Although people like Freeserve, who give you a lot of
access to Freeserve's proxies and not much access to the Internet, could
possibly get away with masqerading.

The advantages to the ISP is that they don't need as many IP address (hint:
Demon (and others) have a lot less 'modems' than subscribers), and that they
can assign a specific IP to a specific modem (or specific pool to a specific
NAS, etc), which makes their internal routeing *much* easier.

Needing more addresses doesn't cost ISPs as such, but they do have to justify
it, and it's not easy.  (It's not that easy to justify addresses for anything
these days - that's one of my hats - but getting allocations for static
dialups is very much the proverbial blood / stone scenario).

Internal routeing isn't a problem for ISPs which have all their dial-up kit
in one location, but one for one with several locations (such as Demon), it's
non-trivial.

Regards,
Tim.