Faster 'Net growth rate raises fears about routers

Tue Apr 3 23:48:48 UTC 2001

At 4/4/01 07:11 AM, Philip Smith wrote:

>If you look at the graphs though, the routing table growth stopped around 
>the end of the year. I've seen 101k prefixes give or take a few hundred in 
>my view since 31st December.... Also, the number of /24s being announced 
>has stopped growing. It's been 58k5 for the last 3 months...
>
>Routing table growth is following the state of the Internet economies? 
>Looks like it to me.

Absolutely - if you look at the strong US dollar and make the observation 
that connectivity prices for Internet are largely driven in USD currency, 
then the relatively stronger USD makes connectivity more expensive in other 
economies - this in turn damps down growth as new non-US markets which are 
dependant on exposure to lower unit prices remain unexposed until the comms 
price declines once more.

hmm  - maybe we can use the first derivative of this BGP table metric as a 
global economy indicator :-)