re: Capacity ".... as measured by OC12-miles, doubles every four months..." Now that's a fascinating form of metric in itself. Distance * bit-rate equals capacity? What happened to the 'traffic' component? Likewise, what does this say regarding the various thresholds for refreshing bandwidth that individual operators have set as defaults, i.e., 20%, or 50%, or even 90%, before pulling the trigger and lighting up the next OC 'n'? Some providers tweaked 'n tuned their networks until the cows came home, others threw bandwidth 'lavishly' at the first inkling of the next plateau being reached. Even full disclosure by all Tier Ones concerning the number of OC-12 ports they were using, under these conditions, couldn't give an accurate picture of actual traffic levels being supported, IMO. --- odlyzko@umn.edu wrote: From: odlyzko@umn.edu (Andrew Odlyzko) To: randy@psg.com Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: off-topic: historical query concerning the Internet bubble Date: Sun, 08 Aug 2010 08:30:44 -0500 Fascinating. Memories may be plastic (something that has been established scientifically), or else we may have yet another inconsistency to add to the pile of others. Is there any documentation about the "doubling every nine months"? I have never seen that particular claim emanating from anyone involved with WorldCom/UUNet. On the other hand, existing record shows (among others): 1. U.S. Department of Commerce white paper from April 1998, http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/ecommerce/EDEreprt.pdf on p. 8 declares that "UUNET, one of the largest Internet backbone providers, estimates that Internet traffic doubles every 100 days," with a reference to an Inktomi white paper that attributes this claim to Mike O'Dell. The Inktomi report is no longer on the Web, but I can provide a copy to anyone interested. 2. The transcript of the May 2000 presentation by O'Dell at a Stanford conference clearly has him saying that the capacity of the UUNet network, as measured by OC12-miles, doubles every four months, http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/isources/odell-transcript.txt As is explained in my paper, in the 1998-2000 time frame, essentially all the WorldCom/UUNet claims then seemed to be about capacity, not traffic. 3. The year-end 2000 email from O'Dell to Dave Farber's IP list, http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200011/ms g00058.html has him talking of traffic doubling each year, while capacity grows 8-fold. If some time in that period there was a claim of a "doubling every nine months," too, that would be very interesting. Andrew Randy Bush <randy@psg.com> wrote:

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my memory is that he said doubling every nine months. Mine too.

mo's too. i asked.

randy