"It's the end of the world as we know it" -- REM

Wed Apr 24 16:19:40 UTC 2013

On 4/23/13 7:44 PM, "Geoff Huston" <gih at apnic.net> wrote:

>On 24/04/2013, at 8:10 AM, Andrew Latham <lathama at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 5:41 PM, Valdis Kletnieks
>> <Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu> wrote:
>>> I didn't see any mention of this Tony Hain paper:
>>> 
>>> http://tndh.net/~tony/ietf/ARIN-runout-projection.pdf
>>> 
>>> ARIN predicted to run out of IP space to allocate in August this year.
>>> 
>>> Are you ready?
>> 
>
>The prediction of runout business is extremely hard. All of these
>predictions are based on the basic premise that what happened yesterday
>will most likely happen tomorrow.

If I were any good at predicting things, I would use my powers for evil.
Your model and Tony's differ largely on how many "yesterdays" are
considered; and, Tony's new model weights yesterday more heavily than
yesteryear, on the guess that recent history is more predictive than
distant past history.

Meanwhile. . . 

>actors. In the address world it was observed that less than 1% (its
>closer to around 0.5%)  individual allocations account for more than half
>of the number of allocated addresses. This becomes a problem in the
>predictive models, as the dominant factor in address consumption is now
>the actions of some 20 or so very large entities.

Fortunately, very large companies are slow to change.
Also, John Curran said during discussion at PPML of extra-regional
allocations: "At the current rate, this is the majority of allocations
we're making."  So, a different 0.5% than most people are probably
thinking of.

I believe he said this growth trend "Leads to a runout Q4-2013 or Q1-2014,
with certainty." 

>
>Following a single largish allocation in early 2012 we've seen the ARIN
>address consumption rate increase somewhat, and the average rate of
>address consumption is currently around 2M addresses per month. If this
>rate of address consumption continues, the ARIN will reach its last /8 in
>early 2014, and if this rate persists, then the registry will exhaust its
>pool around the end of that year, or early 2015.

Sorry, is this to say, "If this rate of consumption continues" or "If this
rate of increase continues"?  I believe the difference is that several
organizations are rapidly progressing through ARIN slow start, using their
space in significantly less than three months.

>
>However, personally I find it a little hard to place a high probability
>on Tony's projected exhaustion date of August this year. I also have to
>qualify that by noting that while I think that a runout of the remaining
>40 M addresses within 4 months is improbable, its by no means impossible.
>If we saw a re-run of the address consumption rates that ARIN experienced
>in 2010, then it's not outside the bounds of plausibility that ARIN will
>be handing out its last address later this year.

It largely depends on whether the new organizations getting address space
hit a growth ceiling (or plateau).  If they do so soon, we return to the
nearly linear Potaroo Projection.  If they continue to grow (especially if
they represent a new business model and others follow suit) then the Hain
Hypothesis holds.

Lee

> 
>
>thanks,
>
>Geoff
>
>
>
>