BGP Updates in 2025: How Routing Table Growth Impacts Internet Stability

According to APNIC, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) update activity in 2025 sheds important light on the evolving scalability and stability of the internet’s global routing system. The discussion examines the changes in routing table growth and dynamic BGP behavior for IPv4 and IPv6 over the past year, with implications for infrastructure resilience, traffic management, and network convergence.

Rising IPv4 and IPv6 Routing Challenges in 2025

The BGP protocol remains vital for internet connectivity by maintaining routing paths across networks. In 2025, the total number of advertised IPv4 prefixes reached 1.2 million compared to 300,000 in 2011, highlighting the vast growth of networks. Meanwhile, the daily IPv4 withdrawal messages stabilized between 18,000 and 25,000 post-pandemic, despite the overall quadrupling of prefixes. IPv6, however, presents unique challenges as its update rate sharply doubled in 2025, reflecting exponential network dynamics. While IPv6 occupies only one-fifth of the IPv4’s prefixes, its noisier behavior showcases ongoing difficulties in achieving routing stability in this smaller-yet-growing space.

Convergence time (how long it takes for the routing system to stabilize after updates) hovered between 20-50 seconds for IPv4 and 40-50 seconds for IPv6. This indicates manageable levels of stability, but there is growing concern that instability at the edge—caused by 0.1% of unstable prefixes—is disproportionately impacting update volume.

Market Context: Why This Matters for the Telecom Industry

The sustained growth in routing tables and updates directly impacts telecom operations, infrastructure investment, and scalability planning. The included data underscores a reality where routing policy dynamics, such as traffic engineering preferences and multihoming practices, are influencing network behavior more than organic network growth. For example, BGP update activity is heavily skewed; in December 2025, 50 autonomous system numbers (ASNs) contributed one-third of IPv4’s instability. For IPv6, the top 0.1% of ASNs contributed to 70% of updates.

This skewed instability highlights the reliance of many operators on suboptimal configurations or traffic management policies that inadvertently destabilize the system. Additionally, IPv4-to-IPv6 transition efforts remain inconsistent across the globe, leading to uneven reliance and varying expertise between protocol implementations. Such operational disparities strain network processing power and elevate costs for global telecom stakeholders.

For major ISPs and cloud providers like AT&T, China Mobile, or Amazon Web Services, optimizing their routing infrastructure to adapt to these shifts could become a competitive differentiator. By improving IPv6 stability and automating policy handling, these players can greatly reduce downtime, improve user experience, and minimize operational disruptions.

Future Outlook: Expert Perspectives on Routing Stability

Experts emphasize the need for proactive measures to ensure the sustainability of BGP, especially as demands on processing capabilities scale with internet growth. Geoff Huston’s analysis points to key areas for focus:

• Traffic Engineering Standardization: Industry standards for how ISPs manage inbound and outbound traffic, particularly with IPv6, can reduce instability caused by human error or inconsistent practices.
• IPv6 Expertise Building: Telecom companies need enhanced operational monitoring for IPv6 to ensure parity with the highly stable IPv4 ecosystem.
• Adaptation to Exponential Growth: Increased adoption of multi-path configurations and BGP oscillation damping mechanisms, such as fine MRAI-timing adjustments (advertisement intervals capped at ~30 seconds), could balance processing loads without significantly raising costs.

The lingering imbalance between IPv4 and IPv6 routing highlights an urgent priority: accelerating global IPv6 readiness while enhancing BGP operational capacity in both domains. However, Huston’s findings give reason for optimism, as the current growth trends remain manageable thanks to the clustered topology of the internet, which contains its average network diameter.

Summary: The State of BGP in 2025

In summary, while BGP’s overall stability remains intact, the rise in updates driven by traffic policies, routing oscillations, and IPv6-specific noise should prompt the telecom industry to act. The lessons from IPv4 scalability can inform IPv6 readiness programs to ensure that future growth does not overwhelm the system. Increased investments in automation, monitoring, and policy standardization will be key for operators. As internet users continue relying on resilient, low-latency networks, how should the telecom industry prioritize its efforts in fostering scalable, sustainable global routing?