I doubt it makes sense to compare that to the previous exhaustion rate. Unless some safeguards are in place, that range will not be assigned in 3 months, but in 3 days. The point is it will increase the number of addresses in circulation, if happens to be successful.
While that new range is hardly significant in relation to the entire address space, putting it in a different context may make it more sane:
- I never seen estimation of subnet transfers exceeding ~500k/yr of /24s. Adding 65k of those is(1) a 10% increase.
- In absolute values 16M is a number that can easily fit needs of companies in multiple developing countries.
- The range may be used for failover addresses.
Of course it may all fail. But what’s the deal if it does, considering nothing of value is sacrificed? And no, it doesn’t require the entire internet to switch. Yes, it may be needed for average Joe watching cats on YouTube, but in general — no. As long as the client supports round robin, latency is not an issue and no obstacles on the client side exist
(2), multiple A records may be offered. If the address can’t be routed, another one will be used.
(1) I have no estimates on total addresses available for leasing/selling, which would be perfect. Calculations based on the transaction volume depend on the period between transactions. If they go above a few years, it will go towards 1–3%, but going the other way it quickly going towards 50%.
(2) If local systems are not updated, the new addresses may be treated as DNS rebinding.