Ford Motor Company
NetRange: 19.0.0.0 - 19.255.255.255
Halliburton
NetRange: 34.0.0.0 - 34.255.255.255
Why does an auto manufacturer or oil business need 16,581,375 IP addresses?
Because they have a whole lot of money.
Your money, in Haliburton’s case. 
Tris
Why not? 15-20 years ago IP addresses were plentiful, and you could just register a huge chunk if you thought you might need them.
“Class A” IP addresses (those with the first digit unique) were handed out to a bunch of pioneering (read large or computer-important) companies back when net resources seemed unlimited (or that TCP/IP would be replaced soon).
In retrospect, it was a bad idea, since the intricacies of subnetting make it very hard to reclaim the unused chunks, but you know what they say about hindsight.
Because of mergers and the like, they’ve changed hands a few times, but they’re basically assets of these companies now, and technically can’t be subdivided.
Interesting factoid: HP has one (a Class A address block), as did Digital Equipment (makers of the VAX and PDP computers, among other things). Compaq aquired Digital a while back, and HP aquired Compaq. So now HP has TWO of them. (Admittedly, HP’s 150K people, but I doubt they have 213 computers apiece that need static IP’s).
All of this is why the (relatively) new IPv6 standard looked good enough to implement on a wide scale.
In simple terms, IPv4, which the current widespread standard, gave us 32 bits to play with as 8 bits per number times four numbers. That works out to around four billion addresses total (2 to the 32nd, or 4,294,967,296). Which sounds like a lot, until you start giving out 16,777,216-address blocks like candy. We’ve worked around our stupidity in various ways (NATting, or Network Address Translating, plus other methods I don’t know or can’t recall right now) but the pinch is on.
Along comes Our Hero, IPv6, which gives us 128 bits to play with. That works out to a number that is really quite hard to grasp. It is so big, in fact, that we could give away the equivalent all the addresses IPv4 gives us total to every living human being many thousands of times over without coming close to running out. It is a license to be stupid beyond our wildest dreams. Every cell phone will have its own IP address, in theory, greatly simplifying addressing. Every cell in your body could have its own IP address. Unless you are the thing that wiped Jabba the Hutt off its ass, every atom in your body could have its own IP address. With God as my witness, I will never be NATted again! There are other nice features as well, but the sheer number of addresses is the killer feature.
I hope your right, but I suspect that the sheer number of devices and programs that don’t support it will be the feature that kills it.
I’d really, really, like to be wrong about this, but v6 has been “ready to go” for years now, and there’s almost no adoption. Everybody seems to think that NAT is “good enough.”
I can’t imagine the number of applications that are being held back by NAT cra…stuff. The ability to have firewalls and still be able to see your devices would allow intercommunication advances on a scale not seen since the beginning of the Internet era…but politicians, businesses, and “tradition” are involved, so it will never happen.
Yeah, and the fun is going to be trying to convert everybody to it (or convince everybody that they should convert). Given the speed of advancing technology and public internet presence, IPv6 is not quite so “new” any more. (I believe I first learned about it around 1998 or 1999). And there are still no signs of it becoming the new “official” standard that everybody uses. Although it would certainly give us enough addresses – just think every person and every cockroach on the planet could have their own static IP address!
Yes. While it’s clear that IPv6 is better technically for a lot of reasons, being better technically is not enough to force adoption. As it is, IP is good enough, and “good enough” usually trumps “technically better.”
Since most companies are getting away from static IPs, the IP address crisis is less urgent. Eventually, IPv6 may become standard – assuming it doesn’t require the retrofitting of all current equipment – but there’s little rush.
Note that the ancestor of the Internet was Arpanet, funded by the the (Defense) Advanced Research Projects Agency to connect cites involved in military-related research. (Companies, universities, the military, etc.) So large military contractors got large blocks of addresses.