With today's announcement of IPv4 exhaustion, it may be time to surface all the legacy FINTEL predicting this day would come, & look at tradecraft. The oldest published cyber intel product I have on hand at the moment that provides analysis on the issue dates from November '03.

The last published estimate in that reporting line anticipated exhaustion in Nov '10, with classic "3 to 5 year" horizon. One notes this estimate was repeated unchanged in '07 & again in '09. It appears analytic baseline was not revisited, with date merely recycled. Lessons here

This reporting clearly influenced later production on alternatives to exhaustion in June '11, but which dropped temporal estimates for the generic language "soon to come". No methodological basis for assessment here, mere analyst's editorializing commentary on a specific event.

This would evolve into a longer estimate in July '11 that noted an "acute stage" of transition "sometime in '12", with caveat "possibly sooner rather than later", creating "urgency that may soon occur". WEP language here directly quoted. FINTEL provided no foundation for estimate

Looking back, did the estimative misses here matter? A 7-10 year temporal error almost certainly impacted investment & resourcing decisions by some consumers, but at what cost versus options to delay plans & acquisition for what remained inevitable?

More significant was miss of why exhaustion occurred later: tech alternatives that reshaped the operating environment, how these developed, evolved, & where they mattered. But that is a longer & more complex discussion, & goes to missing methodology. Futures tradecraft matters