You have started your Telecom Consulting business. It seems like it was yesterday when you were sitting care-free in the most interesting course you ever took at Hood College (IT 548) and today you have to deal with your expanding business. First problem, concurrent internet access. You have 550 employees, each with their desktop and they all need to have Internet access at the same time. You do your market survey and talk to two ISPs, BORIZON and BT&T, in order to buy IP addresses. BORIZON allocates IPs in Class A, B or C while BT&T allocates IPs using CIDR. You want to be mindful of costs so you want to get the smallest IP range that can support all computers.

(a) Let's assume that you want to buy first from BORIZON. You want to buy one class of IPs. Knowing their offerings, what class are you going to purchase and how many addresses will it get you?

(b) Let's assume that you want to now buy BT&T. How many addresses would you get and how many bits will be the network prefix in each address?

(c) Let's assume that you want to go back to BORIZON and want to buy several class C IPs. How many C classes will you need and how many addresses will it get you?

(d) You talk to a colleague and she tells you that her company just bought 10.16.0.0/12 addresses at a price that is significantly lower than what your ISPs are charging you. Does this sound like a good deal to you? If so, why?