BGP in 2025
Geoff Huston’s annual review of the global routing table finds continued but slowing growth through 2025, with the IPv4 table approaching 1.05 million prefixes and IPv6 nearing 242,000.
APNIC’s annual BGP analysis examines how the internet’s routing table changed over 2025, reporting modest growth in both IPv4 and IPv6 and a longer-term deceleration in expansion.
The short version
- By January 2026 the IPv4 routing table held roughly 1,050,000 prefixes, up about 54,000 (5%) over 2025.
- The IPv6 table reached approximately 241,800 prefixes, growing around 20,300 (9%) during the year.
- Total IPv4 advertised address span stayed roughly flat at about 3.1 billion addresses.
- Autonomous system counts rose to about 77,900 in IPv4 (2% growth) and 36,100 in IPv6 (5% growth).
- The author attributes slowing growth to market saturation, hardware limits and the rise of CDNs reducing routing demand.
- The analysis was written by APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston.
Why it matters
The global BGP table is the backbone map every internet router must carry, and its size and churn directly shape hardware requirements and routing stability worldwide. Huston’s finding that growth is decelerating, rather than spiralling, is reassuring for operators worried about table bloat, while steady IPv6 expansion shows the long migration continuing without dramatic acceleration.
Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at APNIC Blog via the links above and below.