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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