On 4/23/13 7:44 PM, "Geoff Huston" <gih@apnic.net> wrote:
On 24/04/2013, at 8:10 AM, Andrew Latham <lathama@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 5:41 PM, Valdis Kletnieks <Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu> wrote:
I didn't see any mention of this Tony Hain paper:
http://tndh.net/~tony/ietf/ARIN-runout-projection.pdf
ARIN predicted to run out of IP space to allocate in August this year.
Are you ready?
The prediction of runout business is extremely hard. All of these predictions are based on the basic premise that what happened yesterday will most likely happen tomorrow.
If I were any good at predicting things, I would use my powers for evil. Your model and Tony's differ largely on how many "yesterdays" are considered; and, Tony's new model weights yesterday more heavily than yesteryear, on the guess that recent history is more predictive than distant past history. Meanwhile. . .
actors. In the address world it was observed that less than 1% (its closer to around 0.5%) individual allocations account for more than half of the number of allocated addresses. This becomes a problem in the predictive models, as the dominant factor in address consumption is now the actions of some 20 or so very large entities.
Fortunately, very large companies are slow to change. Also, John Curran said during discussion at PPML of extra-regional allocations: "At the current rate, this is the majority of allocations we're making." So, a different 0.5% than most people are probably thinking of. I believe he said this growth trend "Leads to a runout Q4-2013 or Q1-2014, with certainty."
Following a single largish allocation in early 2012 we've seen the ARIN address consumption rate increase somewhat, and the average rate of address consumption is currently around 2M addresses per month. If this rate of address consumption continues, the ARIN will reach its last /8 in early 2014, and if this rate persists, then the registry will exhaust its pool around the end of that year, or early 2015.
Sorry, is this to say, "If this rate of consumption continues" or "If this rate of increase continues"? I believe the difference is that several organizations are rapidly progressing through ARIN slow start, using their space in significantly less than three months.
However, personally I find it a little hard to place a high probability on Tony's projected exhaustion date of August this year. I also have to qualify that by noting that while I think that a runout of the remaining 40 M addresses within 4 months is improbable, its by no means impossible. If we saw a re-run of the address consumption rates that ARIN experienced in 2010, then it's not outside the bounds of plausibility that ARIN will be handing out its last address later this year.
It largely depends on whether the new organizations getting address space hit a growth ceiling (or plateau). If they do so soon, we return to the nearly linear Potaroo Projection. If they continue to grow (especially if they represent a new business model and others follow suit) then the Hain Hypothesis holds. Lee
thanks,
Geoff