At 7/15/01 02:03 AM, Nipper, Arnold wrote:
up@3.am schrieb:
It looks like some recent aggregation has been helping to slow down the growth.
If you look at some figures (e.g. http://www.employees.org/~tbates/cidr-report.html) it's even pretty stable around 101K prefixes.
The question is how long will this 'stability' persist. Two factors appear to be at play at present: 1 - there has been an effort by many AS's to reduce the number of address fragments advertised into the global routing tables. The 'noise' in the routing table is being reduced (slightly) 2 - there is some slowdown in overall Internet growth in terms of a) the number of new AS's being added into the global routing table and b) the total span of address space being announced into the global routing table. Either this is an effect of an economic condition (most likely) or a number of folk at the edge are increasing their use of NAT and are disappearing behind the NAT boxes (less likely,but also possible). factor 1 will only be temporary - at some stage the entries which add no additional policy into the routing table will be reduced to the point that no further reduction is possible. At this point int time factor 1 will disappear. factor 2 may or may not disappear - if the slowing down of consumption of AS numbers and the slowing down in the rate of growth of advertised address space is a side effect of a broader economic condition, then one can expect the growth levels to resume at about the same time as we see some level of improvement in the economic outlook. If the factors are based on NAT then this condition may persist for some time. My _guess_ is that the current hiatus in routing table growth is temporary. regards, Geoff (www.telstra.net/ops/bgp has tables relating to address advertisements and AS numbers if you are interested