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Re: Stupid NAT tricks and how to stop them.

2006-03-30 14:27:47
On 30-mrt-2006, at 22:13, Austin Schutz wrote:

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.

        This is much less time than I have seen in previous reports. If
this is accurate and consistent there is a greater problem than I had
previously thought.

You may want to look at Geoff's reports from 2003 and 2005 (and observe the difference between the two). Between 2003 and 2006 the growth was much larger than before 2003.

As for accuracy: the numbers keep jumping up and down so you can pretty much massage them in either direction. These are the number of addresses the RIRs allocated to (mostly) ISPs per month for 2005 and 2006, compiled from the stats published on their FTP sites:

 9.26 M  2005-01
25.16 M  2005-02
17.24 M  2005-03
24.96 M  2005-04
16.67 M  2005-05
16.12 M  2005-06
11.11 M  2005-07
16.92 M  2005-08
 8.80 M  2005-09
 9.89 M  2005-10
 5.78 M  2005-11
 6.62 M  2005-12
 8.95 M  2006-01
11.88 M  2006-02
14.59 M  2006-03

There are now 1428 million addresses still free, give or take one or two /8s because of IANA/ARIN inconsistencies. So we can interpret this as:

- maximum was 26.16 million/month, which gives us another 57 months
- average was 13.6 million/month, which gives us another 105 months
- average when ignoring bottom and top 3 values was 12.8, 111 months

But that's without accelerating growth, which certainly has been the trend most of the time: since 1995, 7 out of 11 years saw more new IPv4 addresses deployed than the year before, 3 less. Unfortunately, the only way to discern a quantifiable trend here involves so much smoothing of the data that the results become meaningless, IMO. That said, with no growth in address usage, we'll be out in 2015 and since 1997, there has always been growth over any three year period. With _any_ growth we'll be out of IPv4 addresses in less than 9 years. It will take something as big as the deployment of CIDR to get us off that track. And no, NAT doesn't even come close. (We went from 211 M in 1991 to 63 M in 1994, since 1997 the biggest drop was about 25% in one year that was made up for the year after that both in 1999 and 2002.)

There are plenty more interesting data points, such as the observation that even though China and India are similar in population, China has 77 million IPv4 addresses (just under the UK and just above Canada) and India 6 million (just under Denmark and just above Hong Kong). There is only one country with more addresses per capita than the US (~4): the Vatican (8192 addresses for 1000 inhabitants). And even though the US tops the absolute and per capita lists of address space holders, it still received the most addresses of any country in 2005: more than the numbers two (Japan) and three (China) together.

If that is indeed the case then the "enhanced nat" road for ipv6
begins to make much more sense, even in the nearer term.

I remember someone saying something about enhanced NAT here a few days ago but I can't find it... What is it and what does it have to do with IPv6?

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