[carsonreinke]

Yeah, Ford definitely does not need its own block

[icedchai]

Who doesn't? I have my own /24 - registered back in the early 90's.

[rjsw]

Ford has as much reason as anyone else to need a block.

Consider subcontractors needing to connect to servers in a particular department.

[mikeash]

Ford has an entire /8, a significant chunk of the entire address space. Ford does not have as much reason to need that much address space compared to, say, major ISPs.

[rjsw]

I would argue that Ford (and the other multinationals) have more need of an /8 than any university that is just in a single city.

[hrrsn]

A /8 is 16,777,216 addresses.

Ford has 181,000 employees as of 2013 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Motor_Company).

That's very roughly 92 publicly routable IP addresses per employee.

I highly doubt they need that many.

[icefox]

What about 1 per car?

[mikeash]

In practice, I imagine they'd outsource the internet connectivity bit to cellular carriers (as is the case for OnStar and similar at the moment) and those companies would be the ones to worry about provisioning IP addresses.

[mikeash]

I would agree, and say that universities with an entire /8 probably shouldn't have them anymore either. That's a case where it definitely made sense early on, but stopped making sense quite a while ago.

[justincormack]

Imperial College had two as the computer science department had its own /8. Probably still does.