as numbers

Fri Jul 29 07:59:42 UTC 2005

Hank,

At 09:13 29/07/2005, Hank Nussbacher wrote:

>"Of the 32,557 assigned AS numbers, some 19,859 are advertised, while
>12,698 have been allocated in the past, but are not currently advertised
>in the BGP routing table."
>
>I would have liked to see how well the RIRs are at recovering unused
>ASNs, if at all.  For example ARIN has a 30 day policy:
>http://www.arin.net/registration/templates/asn-request.txt
>
>Do the RIRs *ever* revoke an ASN after the customer does not follow the
>RIR stated rules?  Would love to see numbers on that issue.  No wonder the
>ASN pool will expire in 2010.

I'd think that 30 days is too low.  What we see (*) is that after 30 days,
only half of the assigned ASN have appeared on the Internet.  Some 75%
of the assigned ASN appear on the net in the first 6 months after
assignment, 80-85% after a year.  Anything not seen after a year (15-20%),
is unlikely to ever appear, these can be recovered (at least in theory).

While this looks like a lot, it does not really solve any problem.  Geoff's
numbers show that the pool will expire in 5 years.  Our estimate is a
little bit longer, but not that much.  2010-2005 is 5 years, if the trend
that 20% never appears continues and all these ASN are revoked, this simply
means that the pool will  expire in 6 years.  2010 or 2011 hardly makes a
difference.

Henk

* Some of our research was presented by Rene Wilhelm @ RIPE50 last May,
   http://www.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-50/presentations/ripe50-plenary-mon-asmia.pdf, 
we have some additional results.  We are working on a write-up
   of all our results, stay tuned.

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