On Sun, Sep 11, 2005 at 09:51:47AM -0700, David Conrad wrote:
Hi,
On Sep 11, 2005, at 12:52 AM, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
This says that although there are 170k prefixes on the Internet, there are only 20k entities who actually need to announce IP space. There is only one explanation for such a large difference (8.5x) between these two numbers, namely that people who are announcing IP space need multiple blocks in order to accomodate their needs.
This is an interesting assertion. I thought the majority of announced prefixes was due to folks punching holes in their registry allocated blocks in order to do traffic engineering of one form of another (multi-homing being a form of traffic engineering).
Can you point at the data which backs up your assertion (I'm not disputing it, just a curious)?
Come on now, the majority of people don't know what traffic engineering is. :) As much as I complain about stupid people announcing their /16s as /24s for no reason, it isn't the "majority" of prefixes. When was the last time you saw an ordinary average customer with only 1 prefix and perfect usage? Yes you're probably right that the majority of prefixes are probably from folks who don't have direct allocations, but that is because they are smaller customers using provider IP space. They aren't announcing a dozen /23s and /24s because they are doing TE, it just happens to be the way that the IPs were allocated as their usage grew over time. I'm not citing any specific study here, this is just common sense if you've ever been in the ISP business. :) -- Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)