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BGP breaks 300,000
By stretch | Tuesday, August 4, 2009 at 3:05 p.m. UTC
Around the turn of the month, the global BGP IPv4 routing table broke the 300,000-route barrier.
The good news is that this growth will more or less plateau when we run out of IPv4 networks. Graphs courtesy of bgp.potaroo.net.
Posted in News
Comments
August 4, 2009 at 3:27 p.m. UTC
Do you think it will plateau when the IPv4 space is exhausted? I think people will become more creative with their addressing needs and that it will grow even further because of smaller subnets being advertised.
August 4, 2009 at 6:37 p.m. UTC
I wonder how much money Cisco has been making on router memory upgrades in the last few years. I know I've had to do a router replacement and a RAM upgrade over the last few years, just to deal with the BGP tables growth.
August 5, 2009 at 12:21 a.m. UTC
I'd also bet that the growth will continue after address exhaustion. There will not be many options other than dividing up what we have into smaller subnets.
August 6, 2009 at 6:20 a.m. UTC
I like your statement " when IPv4 runs out " :) It's like...we won't have to worry about keeping your girl happy if you've already been dumped.
August 7, 2009 at 3:38 p.m. UTC
Thanks for this information, It is agreed that it should flatten out as IPv4 runs short. Has our industry began to decide if with IPv6 their will be ownership of IPv6 space, or will it be monitored still by the authoritys, ARIN, etc..
October 1, 2009 at 4:53 p.m. UTC
The BGP growth rate will NOT flatten out. Every multihomed customer creates at least one entry (usually 2-3 due to load balancing ideas) in the global BGP table.
When IPv4 space runs out, people with /16's will start selling them in /24 chunks. Furthermore, IPv6 prefixes will start appearing in the BGP table, approximately doubling it just to get us all into the dual-stack phase of the transition.
November 10, 2009 at 12:32 a.m. UTC
Funny you mention that... My director came to me the other day and asked if we really need all of our /16... I was like, WTF?!?! I guess $$$ are on the brain.
June 20, 2011 at 5:50 p.m. UTC
At this moment I have more than 350,000 prefixes.