[address-policy-wg] 2006-05 / PI Assignment Size - brief address wastage analysis

As of yesterday, there were ~18000 ASSIGNED PI netblocks in the RIPE DB,
comprising a mixture of recently assigned PI blocks, and a bunch of
older network blocks from the days when RIPE used to allocate /16's
without too much justification.

Of these 18000 blocks, about:

850 are < /24
10285 are /24		(2.5% of ASSIGNED PI space in RIPE)
2650 are /23
1650 are /22
2550 are > /22		(94.3% of ASSIGNED PI space in RIPE)

>From a cursory glance, it would appear that a bunch of these assignments
are misregistered or are subregistrations of other old ASSIGNED PI
blocks.

Particularly notable are the NRENs and the older ISPs, which would have
been allocated large blocks a long time ago.  These blocks are now
classified as ASSIGNED PI instead of ASSIGNED PA.  Much of this IP
address space is aggregated in the routing tables and does not present
much cause for worry from that perspective.

Given that there are only ~850 assignments < /24, it would seem
reasonable to assume that 2006-05 will cause only a very marginal
increase in the amount of address space used for PI announcements.
Therefore there seems little reason to reject the proposal because of
address space wastage.  Yes, a small amount of address space will be
wasted, but in the grand scheme of things, very little.

Nick