Unlike CB, the Internet provides many different services. Each service has a "natural" amount of bandwidth that it consumes. Email can probably get by with 1000bit/sec/user or less. DVD wants on the order of 7-10Mbit/sec/user. Remote harddrives want 100Mbit/sec/user or more. Tying computers together into supercomputers works better if you have 1Gbit/sec/computer or more (depending on the app of course). Consumer grade computers are now fast enough to handle DVD video. CMOS camera chips are dirt cheap. So the natural course of events would be for people to start using the Internet to download DVD clips as well as setting up bidirectional video links. They don't because the network connection that they can buy is too slow to make this practical. So yes, Internet growth is constrained. Dirk On Wed, Sep 02, 1998 at 10:38:31AM -0700, Paul Vixie wrote:
SEAN@SDG.DRA.COM (Sean Donelan) writes:
So what is going on?
Internet growth has slowed.
Internet growth is being constrained by some factor. [...]
The most recent doubling, and most of the one before it, was "the fad thing." CB radio had a similar pair of doublings, but ultimately it got back to the point where only people who had a use for it, used it.
The Internet is more useful than CB radio, but on the other hand when you consider that pornography is more than half of the non-interactive traffic (according to the log files I gathered from a worldwide product rollout in the transparent caching space) it's not clear how many more times we'll need to double the bandwidth of the backbone as the fad effect drops off.
So perhaps the factor constraining the Internet's growth is "good taste." -- Paul Vixie La Honda, CA "Many NANOG members have been around <paul@vix.com> longer than most." --Jim Fleming pacbell!vixie!paul (An H.323 GateKeeper for the IPv8 Network)