The impact analysis states: Reducing the default allocation and assignment period (in three steps) to three months also means that, in the RIPE NCC service region, the industry as a whole will run out of unassigned IP addresses shortly after the RIPE NCC registry runs out. In principle, no LIR will have an excess amount of free addresses left from previous allocations to grow their business for more than three months. I think that is a good thing since it preserves the level playing field nature of RIPE allocation policy. This is far better than having a sudden drastic policy change take effect when the last /8 is allocated. In addition, the 2010 start date gives LIRs enough planning time to get management approval for activities to mitigate the problem, such as deploying IPv6 and forcing low-margin customers off of IPv4 to free the remaining IPv4 addresses for high-margin customers. --Michael Dillon