[ppml]How far is too far?

[william at elan.net]

On Sat, 4 Oct 2003, Marshall Eubanks wrote:

> > Please forgive my ignorance here.
> > But after the dot-bomb shouldn't a large number of ASN's
> > now be unused?  and not just that, what about the 
> > mergers? uunet alternet worldcom etc...
> > When looking at the netatlantis.org site, I seem to 
> > see large gaps..
> 
> 15776 in my BGP address tables, 30,000 or so assigned or allocated (IANA
> isn't talking to me this morning...).

About 29,000 ASNs are allocated (I can check and give exact number of 
somebody needs) because IANA allocates larger blocks, and then RIRs 
allocates from that, and RIRs have not yet allocated entire sets of ASNs 
that was given to them.  IANA's last allocation is 30720-31743 to RIPE 
(they reported it several days ago). That means about 45% of ASNs (based 
on 29,000 number) are allocated or 48% based on 31743 number. And of that
about 55% of ASNs allocated are actively in use.

For ip blocks similar numbers are 7580573 (/24 blocks) or 51% of ip space
(if calculating based on exact allocations by RIRs) or 129 /8 (57% of 
possible ip space when not counting reserved for multicast). For 
comparison number of ip blocks in routing table is 4757590 /24 blocks
or 32% of IPv4 space, so 62% of the number of ip blocks assigned/allocated
are actively in use.

Based on those numbers it is absolutly not clear that we would run out of 
ASNs before running out of IPv4 ips. What is true is that more organizations
got multihomed especially after .bomb of last 3 years, besides that prices
dropped which made things easier. 

Its also clear that we need to start thinking of reclamation process, this 
should preferably be done by joint policy for all RIRs and should apply 
not only to ASNs (and ip blocks) announced by them but for the the ASNs 
and ip blocks given previously by Internic (legacy assignments), those
have largest precentage of unused ip space and asns. Starting reclamation 
from ASNs would be good test before moving to more complex issues with ip 
blocks.

I'll provide link to some of my statistics data for ip blocks next week, 
so you cansee what the current situation is.

-- 
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william at elan.net