BGP Routing Statistics
BGP Information and Statistics
IPv4 Prefixes
~1,115,000
Global routing table
IPv6 Prefixes
~285,000
Global routing table
Active ASNs
~88,000
Publicly routed
IPv4 Exhaustion
Feb 2011
IANA pool depleted
Global Routing Table Growth
Approximate end-of-year values. Sources: RIPE NCC RIS, CIDR Report (Geoff Huston / APNIC). 2026 value estimated.
Key BGP Milestones
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1989 | RFC 1105 — first BGP specification (BGP-1) published |
| 1994 | RFC 1654 — BGP-4 with CIDR support; classless routing slows explosive table growth. IPv4 table: ~20,000 prefixes |
| 1999 | RFC 2547 — BGP/MPLS VPNs defined; BGP begins life as a general-purpose VPN signalling protocol |
| 2001 | IPv4 global routing table passes 100,000 prefixes |
| 2006 | RFC 4271 — revised BGP-4 specification, still in use today. IPv4 table surpasses 200,000 prefixes |
| 2007 | RFC 4893 — 4-byte (32-bit) ASN support; extends the ASN space from 65,536 to over 4 billion autonomous systems |
| 2011 | 3 Feb: IANA IPv4 free pool exhausted — all /8 blocks assigned to the five RIRs. 8 Jun: World IPv6 Day — 24-hour global trial by major content providers |
| 2012 | 6 Jun: World IPv6 Launch Day — Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others permanently enable IPv6; IPv6 routing table begins rapid acceleration |
| 2015 | IPv4 routing table passes 600,000 prefixes; continued address space fragmentation drives sustained growth |
| 2017 | RFC 8092 — BGP Large Communities (32-bit ASN-compatible policy tagging). Widespread RPKI deployment begins |
| 2019 | 24 Jun: BGP route leak via small Pennsylvania ISP causes Cloudflare, Amazon and others to become unreachable for ~2 hours, highlighting fragility of BGP policy propagation |
| 2022 | RFC 9234 — BGP Roles standardised; RPKI Route Origin Validation (ROV) reaches meaningful adoption at tier-1 and tier-2 networks |
| 2024 | IPv4 global routing table crosses 1,000,000 prefixes — a landmark milestone driven by ongoing address fragmentation and PI space assignments |