2011/6/7 Matthew Petach <mpetach@netflight.com>:
Hm. With roughly 1B people on the internet today[0], 7 cycles of doubling would mean that in 15 years, we'd have 128B people on the internet?
I strongly suspect the historical growth curve will *not* continue at that pace.
Well, todays Internet is made of 1B pairs of eyeballs with a roughly average of 120kbps each. Todays average in France is closer to 180kbps, it was closer to 100kbps two years ago (the 3-strikes law side-effect made individual bw consumption spikes with the emergence of many streaming services, far more BW-hungry than soft P2P protocols like eMule), whilst operators gained 8% of annual organic growth (18 to 21M subscribers). That's a bit more than 200% in 2 years. Before that, the avergae bw consumtion was relativelly stable over the last 6 years or so, only the number of residential access subscribers grew. Over the years to come, we'll still see some regions with a growing number of individual accesses while the well-connected regions will see their BW consumption grow even larger with new services. Isn't it what FTTH deployments all around the world are all about ? -- Jérôme Nicolle