For information. Whilst there has been much work done for IPv6 to establish a new protocol which is less likely to run out of number space, the IETF are now working on updating BGP to increase the possible number of Autonomous Systems.

From the RIPE 37 meeting, there were a couple of statistics people who weren't present should be aware of;

Globally 51% of IPv4 address space is allocated, of which 61.8% is actually advertised routes on the Internet (hence 38.9% is 'missing'). Globally AS numbers 30% are assigned, of which 46% are not actually advertised on the Internet. This was the situation in September 2000. http://www.apnic.net/stats/bgp/ may be of further interest. Adrian F Pauling AFP1-RIPE : uk.btent BT Business Services - Information Systems Engineering Tel: +44 1926 851992 Mob: +44 7802 904877 http://www.bt.com -----Original Message----- From: Philip Smith [mailto:pfs@cisco.com] Sent: 16 November 2000 19:55 To: apops@lists.apnic.net Subject: [apops] Fwd: I-D ACTION:draft-chen-as4bytes-00.txt Given the current growth in ASN assignments around the globe, this is appropriate reading for everyone in the region. philip --

To: IETF-Announce:; From: Internet-Drafts@ietf.org Reply-to: Internet-Drafts@ietf.org Subject: I-D ACTION:draft-chen-as4bytes-00.txt Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 06:27:03 -0500 Sender: nsyracus@cnri.reston.va.us

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.

Title : BGP support for four-octet AS number space Author(s) : E. Chen, Y. Rekhter Filename : draft-chen-as4bytes-00.txt Pages : 4 Date : 15-Nov-00

Currently the Autonomous System number is encoded in BGP as a two- octets field. This document describes extentions to BGP to carry the Autonomous System number as a four-octets field.

A URL for this Internet-Draft is: http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-chen-as4bytes-00.txt

Internet-Drafts are also available by anonymous FTP. Login with the username "anonymous" and a password of your e-mail address. After logging in, type "cd internet-drafts" and then "get draft-chen-as4bytes-00.txt".

A list of Internet-Drafts directories can be found in http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html or ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf/1shadow-sites.txt

Internet-Drafts can also be obtained by e-mail.

Send a message to: mailserv@ietf.org. In the body type: "FILE /internet-drafts/draft-chen-as4bytes-00.txt".

NOTE: The mail server at ietf.org can return the document in MIME-encoded form by using the "mpack" utility. To use this feature, insert the command "ENCODING mime" before the "FILE" command. To decode the response(s), you will need "munpack" or a MIME-compliant mail reader. Different MIME-compliant mail readers exhibit different behavior, especially when dealing with "multipart" MIME messages (i.e. documents which have been split up into multiple messages), so check your local documentation on how to manipulate these messages.

Below is the data which will enable a MIME compliant mail reader implementation to automatically retrieve the ASCII version of the Internet-Draft. Content-Type: text/plain Content-ID: <20001115091521.I-D@ietf.org>

ENCODING mime FILE /internet-drafts/draft-chen-as4bytes-00.txt

<ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-chen-as4bytes-00.txt>

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