I
think Christian made very important points.
I'd
like to add one point that I'm sure will sound like a broken record to some
people. Mobile mobile mobile! There are more mobile devices today than
IPv4
can
handle, period. Everyone is using NATs to build their mobile networks. The
question
here
is will NATs survive the types of services that operators want to provide?
From
where I'm looking, the problems are profound and extremely difficult to solve.
I
think the reason this hasn't been more widely understood is that we're still not
close
to
seeing those mobile peer to peer services over IP. But when that happens (no
speculation
from
me here), I think operators will realise what they're in for. This is especially
true
for
large operators.
So,
there is more to this than simply looking at the remaining address space and
the
rates of allocation.
Hesham
-----Original Message-----
From: ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx [mailto:ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Christian Huitema
Sent: Saturday, November 06, 2004 5:06 PM
To: Bob Braden; harald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; gih@xxxxxxxxx
Cc: v6ops@xxxxxxxxxxxx; ietf@xxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: IPv4 consumption statistics and extrapolations> 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??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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