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

Wed Apr 24 20:08:34 UTC 2013

Lee Howard wrote:
> 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.

Indeed, the current set of actors appears to be different than the
historical set, with a very different deployment-model/demand-curve. 

> 
> 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.

I only looked at organizations that had multiple allocations larger than a
/20 in the last 9 months. There may well be as many, or more that have had
multiple /22,/21,/20 sequences in that window, but if they are that small at
this point, they might never get to a /16 before the pool runs out if the
larger ones keep going. 

> 
> 
> >
> >However, personally I find it a little hard to place a high probability
> >on Tony's projected exhaustion date of August this year.

I was not trying to place any probability on the outcome, and would tend to
agree with you that August 2013 is not particularly likely, but would say it
much more likely than having anything left by August 2014. That said, a new
set of players showing compound growth in short timeframes is not what the
historical-model projections are based on, so we do need to look more at
current behavior than the distant past.

> > 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.

There is another open question about the growth rate in the number of new
players showing compound growth in deployments. It may not be that any of
them individually gets large enough to make a significant dent on their own,
but if there is compound growth in the number of new slow-start actors, you
still have compound growth in demand, but you may not be looking in the
right place to see why the numbers are large enough to matter.

The really troubling thing that I don't get is why RR got a pile of little
blocks rather than a /12 up front. I don't know if that is an impact of
broken policy, internal deployment decisions about 'right size' allocations
rather than intentional deaggregation, or trying to 'fly under the radar'.
If it is a policy problem it might be worth trying to understand and maybe
fix any long term impact on market transfers. 

Tony

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