On 29-mrt-2006, at 2:17, Tony Hain wrote:
In the past 10 years, there have been several years where the growth
of the growth was less than the year before:
1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
2.7 1.2 1.6 1.2 2.1 2.4 1.9 2.4 3.4 4.5
(The numbers represent the number of addresses used up in that year
as a percentage of the 3.7 billion total usable IPv4 addresses.)
Part of the problem here is that the allocation bundles don't map
well into
nice clean annual buckets. It is the overall trend that matters,
not the
fact that any given year had a higher or lower growth rate.
That's why I prefer to look at the RIR->ISP figures rather than the
IANA->RIR figures. I have a few scripts on my server to download the
statistics from the RIR FTP sites and parse them. (Have a look at
http://bgpexpert.com/addrspace.php if you want to peruse the numbers
yourself.) This is what the RIRs gave out the past few years:
78.24 M 2000
89.07 M 2001
68.97 M 2002
87.82 M 2003
128.58 M 2004
168.53 M 2005
35.14 M 2006
This basically means that unless things take a radical turn, the
long-
term trend is accelerating growth so that remaining 40% will be gone
in less than 9 years. Probably something like 7, as Geoff Huston
predicts.
While the exact date of exhaustion is impossible to predict,
Geoff's 2012
target is presented to placate those in serious denial. The
fundamental burn
rate has been compound growth since 2000, and there is no reason
for it to
slow.
Look above. 35 million this quarter so far means we're going to end
up below last year's 168 million unless things _really_ start cooking
the next quarters. If you drill down a bit more we're actually
recovering from a fairly big slump late last year. In order to
deplete IPv4 (including the RIR reserves which are at an all time
high of nearly 400 million) in 2010 the yearly address use needs to
grow by an average 30%:
Addresses left year end used that year
2006 1304 175
2007 1077 228
2008 781 296
2009 396 384
2010 -104 500
While a 30% growth rate isn't unprecedented (2003: 27%, 2004: 46%,
2005: 31%), I have a hard time imagining how this can continue year
after year. At some point, all of this has to relate to something in
the real world. In North America and Europe, IP penetration is such
that doing more of the same can't be exponential because you reach
100% within a few years. The rest of the world could have exponential
growth for a longer time, but since the top 12 countries take up 75%
of all yearly IPv4 address usage those remaining 25% can't fuel a 30%
growth on their own at this point.
Now all of this doesn't mean there can't be any new developments that
change address usage, but it does mean it will have to be something
new, like every cell phone getting its own IP address. The figures
over the past few years suggest that high growth happens in short
burst after which there is a relapse. The average growth since 2000
was 16% even though 2003 - 2005 were double or triple that. If we
land at 150 million this year it will have been 13%. At 16% we'll be
out of IPv4 addresses in 2011, at 13% in 2012. So the difference
between 30% and 13% is only two years...
In fact at the past NANOG meeting John asked if anyone saw reason for
ARIN to pursue modifying the policy, and there was dead silence as no
organization was willing to slow their business model for 'the
global good'.
The question is: would modifying the policies to be more restricting
be "the global good"? John Klensin says that we're out of IPv4
addresses for all intents and purposes anyway because the addresses
are too hard to get as it is. If it gets harder at the one hand this
means life gets more difficult, but at the other hand it means we get
to limp along for longer, making the period where IPv4 is painful but
not painful enough to adopt IPv6 even longer.
However, it might make sense for the RIRs to stop giving out such
ridiculously large blocks:
mysql> select rir, country, day, descr, num from addrspace where type
= 'ipv4' and day >= '2000-01-01' order by num desc, day desc limit 8;
+---------+---------+------------+------------+----------+
| rir | country | day | descr | num |
+---------+---------+------------+------------+----------+
| apnic | JP | 2005-02-08 | 126.0.0.0 | 16777216 |
| arin | US | 2005-04-19 | 73.0.0.0 | 12582912 |
| ripencc | FR | 2006-03-02 | 90.0.0.0 | 8388608 |
| ripencc | FR | 2005-03-02 | 86.192.0.0 | 4194304 |
| ripencc | GB | 2005-02-07 | 86.128.0.0 | 4194304 |
| apnic | CN | 2004-12-23 | 59.192.0.0 | 4194304 |
| apnic | JP | 2004-05-20 | 60.64.0.0 | 4194304 |
| ripencc | DE | 2004-03-10 | 84.128.0.0 | 4194304 |
+---------+---------+------------+------------+----------+
If Softbank in Japan really needs 16 million addresses then it
doesn't matter whether they get 1 /8 or 16 /12s, but if it turns out
they really need 9 million then having them come back for /12s means
they'll only end up using 9 of those and not wasting much address
space, while with a /8 they'd be wasting 7 million addresses. At
these levels routing table issues don't come into play.
[when we're out of IPv4 addresses]
At that point, it becomes a no-brainer to add IPv6 to
bypass the IPv4 NAT and soon people who still have enough IPv4 space
will want to use IPv6 too because that gives them easier access to
people who don't have an IPv4 address.
While you are correct, this seems to understate the case. The compound
consumption rate of the last 5+ years has been during wide
deployment of
nat. While many still disbelieve, there really are organizations
that have
exceeded the capacity set aside in rfc1918 and for business reasons
are
refusing to deal with multi-layered internal nat. They understand
the real
cost of this broken technology, and will not go there.
Sounds like a good use for class E...
Actually I think the significance of NAT as an IPv4 address
conservation tool is overstated. Yes, if you'd start giving every box
with an RFC 1918 address a real address you'd be out of IPv4
addresses before the day is over, but that was never a realistic
scenario anyway. And before NAT we had proxies which allow the same
thing for applications that support them.
It would also help if by that time all software would work over IPv6.
Unfortunately this is a case of the application dev community
needing a
serious wake up call. The unrealistically long lifetime projections
for IPv4
don't help in this regard either.
But unrealistically short projections won't help either. The truth
is, that we simply don't know what's going to happen with any degree
of certainty. Given that fact, I'd rather start with projections on
the long side and adjust them down gradually. That way, people will
see that this is serious within a few years. By giving out very short
projections that have to be revised upwards people may assume this is
going to continue indefinitely so they really don't have to do
anything. And if it's really 2009 we'll be in trouble regardless of
what we say now because there isn't enough time to get people into
action fast enough to make for a smooth transition.
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