When will 128M not be enough?

Wed Jul 18 00:59:38 UTC 2001

At 7/15/01 02:03 AM, Nipper, Arnold wrote:

>up at 3.am schrieb:
>
> >
> > It looks like some recent aggregation has been helping to slow down the
> > growth.
>
>If you look at some figures (e.g.
>http://www.employees.org/~tbates/cidr-report.html) it's even pretty stable
>around 101K prefixes.

The question is how long will this 'stability' persist.

Two factors appear to be at play at present:

1 - there has been an effort by many AS's to reduce the number of address 
fragments advertised into the global routing tables. The 'noise' in the 
routing table is being reduced (slightly)

2 - there is some slowdown in overall Internet growth in terms of a) the 
number of new AS's being added into the global routing table and b) the 
total span of address space being announced into the global routing table. 
Either this is an effect of an economic condition (most likely) or a number 
of folk at the edge are increasing their use of NAT and are disappearing 
behind the NAT boxes (less likely,but also possible).

factor 1 will only be temporary - at some stage the entries which add no 
additional policy into the routing table will be reduced to the point that 
no further reduction is possible. At this point int time factor 1 will 
disappear.

factor 2 may or may not disappear - if the slowing down of consumption of 
AS numbers and the slowing down in the rate of growth of advertised address 
space is a side effect of a broader economic condition, then one can expect 
the growth levels to resume at about the same time as we see some level of 
improvement in the economic outlook. If the factors are based on NAT then 
this condition may persist for some time.

My _guess_ is that the current hiatus in routing table growth is temporary.

regards,

    Geoff

(www.telstra.net/ops/bgp has tables relating to address advertisements and 
AS numbers if you are interested