As you may recall (because you have been part of it) the 1995-2000 was a period of major consolidation in the ISP industry, metrics were hard to obtain and the ones available were hard to believe. Due to the consolidation of many small networks from various ISPs (I remember that in my former life we engulfed several of the surviving post NSFNet regionals), almost all the big pipes of those ISPs were up to the choking point, then when the time came to move all those pipes to a better backbone and exchange points, and in the process make them bigger, traffic started to increase dramatically, accompanied as well by a decrease in packet loss and delays. The consolidation also helped to move mom & pop configuration of stacked us robitics modems to much modern, efficient and reliable aggregation technologies and architectures on the access side, add ISDN, DSL, cable, etc. Not sure how to include it as a variable, but at least in the US the Telecom Act of 1996 also changed the playing field, CLECs and other new telecom companies were born. On top of that, in that period there was also a big increase in international capacity, some connections (particularly south and central america) were switching from satellite to fiber, many developing countries (some of them were just coming out of highly monopolized and regulated telecom services) were able to have access to better international connections, plus all the traffic growth driven from the application side, plus the contribution of dramatic growth in shared and dedicated hosting services. I don't recall or have at hand at this time the exact figure, but I'd agree with you that at some time it looked like a ~10x thing whit some spurts of much higher growth. Cheers Jorge