[atlas] Why has probe growth stagnated?

Hello,

On 2019-02-20 09:36, Gert Doering wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Wed, Feb 20, 2019 at 06:52:28AM +0200, Hank Nussbacher wrote:
>> On Tue, 19 Feb 2019, scg at gibbard.org wrote:
>>
>> ASN coverage is just 5.6%.  That really doesn't give a complete global 
>> view for stats.  Rather than return money to LIRs every year in their 
>> bill, why not state that any LIR running an active probe within their ASN 
>> will get a 50Euro credit on their bill?  That alone would increase ASN 
>> footprint coverage quickly within RIPE.
> 
> I like that suggestion :-)
> 
> (Not sure how that will pan out if we reach 50% of all LIRs, but to get
> from 5% to 20%, it might definitely be an idea)

Interesting idea indeed!

Let me try to address a few points that were mentioned before, perhaps
by providing some background information along the way.

The growth rate is indeed slower than in the early days. As with
everything, there's no single reason for this. On one hand we had
shortage of hardware probes (which is hopefully solved for the moment,
see:
https://labs.ripe.net/Members/alun_davies/new-ripe-atlas-version-4-probes/document_view_resolve).
On the other hand, it's harder to reach "uncovered" networks and as
someone mentioned before, the "the low hanging fruit being pretty
saturated".

We measure ASN coverage compared to all ASN-s that announce anything at
all, so depending on how hard one wants to argue for having a probe "in
every AS", this may or may not need improvement. We're certainly
encouraging all our ambassadors and prospective hosts to deploy probes
where we don't have them yet. The current application process has a
built-in preference for new networks.

For a few years now the procurement of new probes is funded exclusively
by sponsors. Therefore we'd be very happy to see more sponsors stepping up.

Finally: the public graph about the number of users shows the total we
have so far (meaning users who interacted with RIPE Atlas while they
were logged in via RIPE Access). We can, if this is deemed useful, track
the number of recent users too (for some definition of recent).

Regards,
Robert