classful routes redux

Fri Nov 4 19:41:48 UTC 2005

On Fri, 4 Nov 2005, Christopher L. Morrow wrote:
> On Fri, 4 Nov 2005, Russ White wrote:
>>
>> - -- BGP is currently moving to a 2^32 space for AS numbers. That's odd,
>> if there's only 18,044 origins in the current table, and it won't ever
>> grow to much more--how'd we lose 40,000 or so AS numbers, that we now
>> need more than 64,000?
>
> I think someone at CAIDA or even Renesys could put out some good numbers
> for 'origin' AS counts and even 'AS in aspath' It's slightly higher than
> 18k, but not 40k higher :) At last look (during arin/nanog meeting) it was
> about 20k unique origins (from 701 perspective as seen through
> routeviews)

>From [bgp.potaroo.net], the number of all ASs seen in all the 
route-views routing tables is around 21,000.

Plenty of space to recover, even though some of those might be in 
private use (and might or might not be able to use private ASNs).

There just doesn't seem to be the political will to do so (e.g., by 
starting charging some amount of money per year, so dead/unpaid ones 
would be turned up).  Or folks may consider that too big an effort 
compared to just upgrading to 4B as numbers now.

Seems a bit irresponsible to me.  Personally I'd rather focus on 
cleaning up the AS number mess a bit rather than throwing more 
technology at the problem.

-- 
Pekka Savola                 "You each name yourselves king, yet the
Netcore Oy                    kingdom bleeds."
Systems. Networks. Security. -- George R.R. Martin: A Clash of Kings