Subject: Re: IPv4 consumption statistics and extrapolations

From: [email-masked] (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Sun, 7 Nov 2004 09:30:12 -0500 (EST)

> From: Geoff Huston <[email-masked]>

    > I would like to correct a few numbers in Tony's comments based on my
    > work in this area that Tony has referred to.
    > ...
    > At this rate the central pool will exhaust in 2018, some 14 years hence.

The incredibly rich irony, for those with long memories, is that *IPv6 only
exists because of a previous round of FUD about IPv4 address exhaustion* -
one spread by the proponents of yet another protocol that was going to
"replace" IPv4 - i.e. CLNP.

"It's deja vu all over again".

Of course, there's a wondeful recursive flavour to this go-round (as noted
above) that was missing from the last one.

    > (Of course you should consult your favourite oracle, mystic, soothsayer
    > or whatever for your own preferred version of the future.)

At one point, Frank Solensky had a very interesting graph - which was of the
forward motion of the "IPv4 addresses will run out" date. (I.e. the X axis
was "date prediction was made", and the Y axis was "predicted date of
exhaustion"). It would be very interesting to see what it would look like
today, if updated.

	Noel

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---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 7 Nov 2004 10:40:01 -0500

On Sun,  7 Nov 2004 09:30:12 -0500 (EST), Noel Chiappa wrote:
>  The incredibly rich irony, for those with long memories, is that *
>  IPv6 only exists because of a previous round of FUD about IPv4
>  address exhaustion* - one spread by the proponents of yet another
>  protocol that was going to "replace" IPv4 - i.e. CLNP.

Noel, this assertion is just plain wrong.

The IPv6 effort began because, 10 years ago, we ALREADY had legitimate 
requests for address blocks being refused.  Had those requests been 
honored, we would have run out of addresses almost instantly.

And therein lies the key, strategic error we made.  We looked for when 
we would no longer be able to satisfy ANY requests -- and the estimate 
I remember was 2020 -- rather than when we had to start refusing 
legitimate ones.

So, the market found a way to route around our non-responsiveness.  
Now we need to learn to live with it.  

(We would probably have had to learn to live with NATs in any case, 
since there is a different line of analysis that says that NATs serve 
more purposes than countering address space scarcity and that they 
were essentially inevitable because of the leaf-network conveniences 
they provide.)

d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
+1.408.246.8253
dcrocker  a t ...
www.brandenburg.com