Re: exponential route prefix growth, was: Re: The Cidr Report

["J. Scott Marcus" <smarcus () genuity com>]

At 15:38 09/22/2000 -0400, Kai Schlichting wrote:
> At Friday 03:00 PM 9/22/00, Tony Bates wrote:
>
> > Check http://www.employees.org/~tbates/cidr.plot.html for a plot
> > of the table history.
>
> Is this just me, or has noone commented on this in a while?
> Somehow we are seeing an exponential growth in the number of prefixes
> in the last 12 months, while it was linear for the 5 years
> before that ( http://www.employees.org/~tbates/cidr.hist.plot.html )...

Actually, I have been looking at Tony's plots of active AS numbers for some
time, and every time I do, I get a nervous twitch in my gut.

Thanks for your post, Kai...  You inspired me to do the obvious analysis.
It turns out that the trend did not suddently become exponential; rather,
it was exponential all the time, as near as I can figure.  Tony was kind
enough to ship me his source data.  I cleaned up the obvious outliers
(significant deviation from monotonic non-decreasing, i.e. the big dips in
his graph) by hand and ran a quick exponential regression.

The R-squared (goodness of fit) for the full sequence going back to 1996
comes out at .9957 - as good a fit as you are ever likely to see on real
data.  It's a beautiful, textbook result.  Exponential!

If I did not fat finger the math, the implications are obvious, and troubling.

- Scott (speaking only for himself)