A comment from Jeremy Orbell at LINX: -- The period of growth being discussed predates my own involvement in the industry as I didn't join LINX until 2003. However I do know that LINX regularly announced new traffic milestones at the exchange as they happened back in the late 90s. I've looked back through our archive of press releases and noted a few of these so you will get an idea of how peak traffic was increasing at LINX at that time. 27 April 1998 - 200 Mbps 24 August 1999 - 850 Mbps 17 September 1999 - 1 Gbps 5 November 1999 - 1.25 Gbps 13 December 1999 - 1.5 Gbps 27 March 2000 - 2 Gbps 11 January 2001 - 5 Gbps Unfortunately I cannot post links the original material as it isn't available online at the moment but in the LINX 15th anniversary issue of HotLINX last year we reprinted a copy of a LINX press release from 17th September 1999 which said: "The London Internet Exchange is pleased to announce it has this week reached traffic levels of one Gigabit, positioning it clearly as one of the top 5 Internet Exchanges in the world. This shows a 455% increase in traffic from the level of 180 Mbps one year ago." Looking at that 180 Mbps number it looks like it might refer to a Spring 1998 figure rather than September 1998 because I did find a reference to a peak of 200 Mbps being achieved in April of that year. The discrepency could perhaps be explained by other means such as averages but like I say, it was before my time. Anyway, the full press release which I quoted from can be read on page 3 of the following PDF:https://www.linx.net/files/hotlinx/hotlinx-20.pdf I hope this will be of hope to you. Jeremy Orbell LINX Marketing & Communications On Aug 10, 2010, at 4:28 PM, Jeff Young wrote:
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At the time these statements were made it was possible to make reasonable assumptions about the size of the Internet. As a Tier 1 knew how much traffic our customer links generated by the size of the link. We knew exactly how much traffic stayed within our backbones and how much traffic ended up in a peering arrangement. We knew with some precision just how much of the Tier 2 ISP market was connected to us and how much was connected to others, and who the others were. I don't think the theory still holds but traffic on-net versus off-net was a pretty good indication of market share.
Today's Internet handles much more traffic in-region and is bounded by phenomenon such as language barrier (although the amount of spam I get in Chinese characters has increased recently, who let the barrier down?). This phenomenon wasn't as prominent in '98-'01 and while I wouldn't say it's impossible I think you'd have to commission the folks at UCSD to get anything that resembled a value for total Internet capacity today.
Doubling in 9-12 months was a reasonable figure back then. 100 days might have been a short-term spike caused by a back-log of activations (we sometimes stopped the machine while we made upgrades) but it certainly was an anomaly.
jy
On 10/08/2010, at 9:01 AM, Kenny Sallee wrote:
On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 2:52 PM, Jessica Yu <jyy_99@yahoo.com> wrote:
I do not know if making such distinction would alter the conclusion of your paper. But, to me, there is a difference between one to predict the growth of one particular network based on the stats collected than one to predict the growth of the entire Internet with no solid data. Thanks!--Jessica
Agree with Jessica: you can't say the 'Internet' doubles every x number of days/amount of time no matter what the number of days or amount of time is. The 'Internet' is a series of tubes...hahaha couldn't help it....As we all know the Internet is a bunch of providers plugged into each other. Provider A may see an 10x increase in traffic every month while provider B may not. For example, if Google makes a deal with Verizon only Verizon will see a huge increase in traffic internally and less externally (or vice versa). Until Google goes somewhere else! So the whole 'myth' of Internet doubling every 100 days to me is something someone (ODell it seems) made up to appease someone higher in the chain or a government committee that really doesn't get it. IE - it's marketing talk to quantify something. I guess if all the ISP's in the world provided a central repository bandwidth numbers they have on their backbone then you could make up some stats about Internet traffic as a whole. But without that - it just doesn't make much sense.
Just my .02 Kenny
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