> Some 10 years ago, every
IETF plenary meeting had a soothsayer session,
> projecting how soon we would run out of IPv4 addresses. Has anyone
> looked to see how today's data extrapolates from the predictions then?
> Was it as "S" curve, after all??
> projecting how soon we would run out of IPv4 addresses. Has anyone
> looked to see how today's data extrapolates from the predictions then?
> Was it as "S" curve, after all??
There are two kinds of S curves, depending on what
creates the asymptote. You may have an S curve that flattens when everybody is
served (e.g. everybody on earth has a TV set), and another that flattens when
the resource is exhausted (e.g. the last cod has been fished). Whether the
address allocation falls in one or the other category will certainly be
debated...
As for extrapolating IANA assignment of /8 addresses,
it is an interesting game. The data is available for everybody to look at http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space.
If you sort allocations by date, you see three phases:
- an initial allocation phase that ends in May 1993
when addresses start to be allocated by RIR using the CIDR policy. At the end of
May 93, 94 prefixes are allocated or otherwise reserved.
- a relatively slow growth from May 93 to April 04,
during which 50 new prefixes are allocated
- a recent spurt of activity causing 20 allocations
between April and November 04.
Depending over which period you average, we can argue
that the allocation rate is:
- 6.8 per year between 1981 and 2004 (163 blocks
divided by 24 years)
- 4.5 per year between May 1993 and April 2004 (50
blocks divided by 11)
- 6 per year between May 1993 and November 2003 (70
divided by 11.5)
- 34 per year lately (20 blocks over the course of 7
months)
I can assume that different soothsayers will pick
different values, depending on whether they want to tell us that the sky is
falling, or on the contrary that we should not worry.
Another point of debate is how many blocks are
actually available. Right now, 163 are in use, out of a total of 256, so we may
assume that 93 are available. However, 16 of these blocks fall in the former
"class E" category, and may or may not be easy to use...
-- Christian Huitema
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