Long time IPv4 observer and prognosticator Tony Hain has just published a new report on ARINs IPv4 free pool with a new projection for exhaustion. Titled “Thoughts on the ARIN burn rate projections,” the report looks at a fairly recent rush of what are apparently new (to ARIN) organizations in “slow start” (31 organizations which are almost all doubling or more every couple of months), as well as more established ARIN members who have come to the trough multiple times in the past 9 months (some receiving fairly large allocations), and weights these newer allocations more heavily than historical data. The result is captured in what may be a startling graph to many, at the end of the report:
No, you’re not seeing things, that green projection line hits zero around mid August – of this year!
I asked Tony about how he developed the projection and he was kind enough to fill me in on some more detail:
1/today-first_of_each_month to create a weighting that decays historically
Use that as a modifier to the actual rate of change for each month, then
forecast based on the result.Just taking the historical data and running the 6th order polynomial
projection:
y = -3E-15x^6 + 8E-10x^5 – 9E-05x^4 + 4.7537x^3 – 146718x^2 + 2E+09x – 2E+13
creates an almost identical curve, that hits zero a few days earlier.
I’m not one to say that the sky is falling, but I think that everyone watching IPv4 exhaustion – everyone who depends on the IPv4 Internet for that matter – should pay attention as this trend starts to play out over the next several weeks. In fact, the ARIN IPv4 counter has dropped from about 2.9 /8s available to just over 2.4 /8s available over the course of this week alone…
