There is an often quoted statistic of the Internet doubling every 12 months. If we look at a snippet of data from the old NSFNet data from ANS, we can see this pretty clearly... Month Inbound Gigapackets/mo 9409 36 9410 44 9411 45 9412 46 [...] 9409 71 9410 85 9411 90 9412 78 9501 71 9502 57 9503 64 9504 36 (the decrease after November due to the different NSF regionals transitioning to their new providers) While it was never possible to have a view of all of the traffic on the Net, these NSFNet stats were useful as a representative sample of the entire whole. In particular, this doubling time is quite useful as a metric to try and judge general network growth and for planning. Obviously several things in the past year have occured that have greatly shortened this time. Amongst them the explosion of Web traffic and interactive applications, the huge number of new companies connecting their coporate LANS to the Net, the [I'm running out of synoymns for enormous, ah] enormous number of new companies selling and promoting Net and Web services. This is coupled with the big increase in infrastructure that ISPs and NSPs have built that help move all these bits about. I've see a few guesses on this list as to a doubling rate, but I'm wondering if there is a way to judge this growth in some sort of external and non-proprietary way. Perhaps a relationship between "average traffic" and the number of routes? This probably wouldn't hold in the specific (because of the degree of use of CIDR at a particular ISP), but may hold in the aggregate. Thinking caps? -scott (huddle@mci.net) MCI Internet Engineering