well if I may stick my two cents in from a rainy russian sankt peterburg, I disagree. Sure the majority of my traffic is not local and I do business with my newsletter all over the world/ But I will not be entirely happy with the internet until i have a locally usable conncetion to my township city hall where I and my fellow citizens can debate local politics. I want the same connection to my local school board and internet using teachers. the same to my county commissioners and my state legislature. I want email to the local library and use of its web site. I want access to local transportation schedules and local businesses and restaurant menus. and yes maybe even to the local pizza parlor. as long as we live in **physical places** and pay taxes to local governments, the internet will not make local geography entirely irrelevant. I cannot predict exact percentages but I know with certainty there is a LOT of local communication the *I* would like to do that I cannot. Given an increase in the density of local users local traffic will surely increase. *********************************************************************** The COOK Report on Internet For subsc. pricing & more than 431 Greenway Ave, Ewing, NJ 08618 USA ten megabytes of free material (609) 882-2572 (phone & fax) visit http://cookreport.com/ Internet: cook@cookreport.com New Special Report: Internet Governance at the Crossroads ($175) http://cookreport.com/inetgov.shtml ************************************************************************ On Wed, 17 Sep 1997, Paul Ferguson wrote:
At 04:23 PM 9/17/97 -0700, Pushpendra Mohta wrote:
Even in the scenario where physical proximity automatically implied network proximity, I think the assumption that local traffic will dominate communications needs to be revisited. It is true today, only because that is how people live lives and conduct business _today_. The concept of "community" today is geographical.. the communities of tommorrow may not be so restricted.
I'm not at all convinced that 'local' traffic stays 'local', in fact, I'd suspect that the latter case which you mention is already true.
I'd very much like to see the ration of traffic which is 'pushed' to that which is 'pulled' from the local exchange, especially at smaller exchanges (e.g. Tucson, Packet Clearing House) to verify these assumptions. Not sure enough solid data can be correlated at the larger exchange points to provide a conclusion.
- paul