Once upon a time, Streiner, Justin <streiner@stargate.net> said:
My thoughts on the subject are: 1) While the number of service providers (ISPs, MSPs, ASPs, <insert letter for marketing buzzword>SPs, etc) appears to be on the the decline, it stands to reason that the amount of traffic present at an exchange point should remain relatively constant on average, and probably grow. This is because as service providers go out of business or are acquired by other organizations, the traffic that a given provider was carrying either gets displaced by customers taking their traffic/business elsewhere, or the traffic gets borged into the network of the acquiring provider.
I would think that, depending on who bought/merged with who, traffic may decrease as the networks are merged. After all, there was some amount of traffic between those networks that probably passed through an exchange point somewhere that is now being handled internally.
I base this on empirical observation from my viewpoint as a network engineer at a mid-sized service provider, not on actual observation. Anyone that has done such observation feel free to chime in ;-)
Of course, what do I know; I guess we don't rate as "mid-sized" around here. :-) -- Chris Adams <cmadams@hiwaay.net> Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.