Researchers have complained for years about the lack of good statistics about the internet for a couple fo decades, since the end of NSFNET statistics. What are the current estimates about the size of the Internet, all IP networks including managed IP and private IP, and all telecommunications including analog voice, video, sensor data, etc? CAIDA, ITU, Telegeography and some vendors like Cisco have released forecasts and estimates. There are occasional pieces of information stated by companies in their investor documents (SEC 10-K, etc).
Current size is HUGE and growing at a phenomenal speed. Public IP networks...just look at ARIN, RIPE,etc and see how many IPs there are left. Private networks and private IPs...well that is anyone's guess. There are no estimates because everything changes rather fast and noone can keep up with all this stuff. The only thing you could have a really good estimate are the resources used by your company and thats about it. On 8/14/2013 5:32 PM, Sean Donelan wrote:
Researchers have complained for years about the lack of good statistics about the internet for a couple fo decades, since the end of NSFNET statistics.
What are the current estimates about the size of the Internet, all IP networks including managed IP and private IP, and all telecommunications including analog voice, video, sensor data, etc?
CAIDA, ITU, Telegeography and some vendors like Cisco have released forecasts and estimates. There are occasional pieces of information stated by companies in their investor documents (SEC 10-K, etc).
Iz this big *spreads arms wide open* On 13-08-14 11:10 AM, Alex wrote:
Current size is HUGE and growing at a phenomenal speed. Public IP networks...just look at ARIN, RIPE,etc and see how many IPs there are left. Private networks and private IPs...well that is anyone's guess.
There are no estimates because everything changes rather fast and noone can keep up with all this stuff. The only thing you could have a really good estimate are the resources used by your company and thats about it.
On 8/14/2013 5:32 PM, Sean Donelan wrote:
Researchers have complained for years about the lack of good statistics about the internet for a couple fo decades, since the end of NSFNET statistics.
What are the current estimates about the size of the Internet, all IP networks including managed IP and private IP, and all telecommunications including analog voice, video, sensor data, etc?
CAIDA, ITU, Telegeography and some vendors like Cisco have released forecasts and estimates. There are occasional pieces of information stated by companies in their investor documents (SEC 10-K, etc).
I should have remembered, NANOG prefers to correct things. So here are several estimates about how much IP/Internet traffic is downloaded in a month. Does anyone have better numbers, or better souces of numbers that can be shared? Arbor/Merit/Michigan Internet Observatory: 9,000 PB/month (2009) Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies: 7,500-12,000 PB/month (2009) Cisco Visual Network Index: Total IP: 55,553 PB/month (2013) Fixed IP: 39,295 PB/month (2013) Managed IP: 14,679 PB/month (2013) Mobile Data: 1,578 PB/month (2013) Telegeography via ITU report: 44,000 PB/month (2012) National Security Agency: 55,680 PB/month (2013) Individual providers/countries Australian Bureau of Statistics (AU only) : 184 PB/month (2012) AT&T Big Petabyte report (AT&T only): 990 PB/month (2013) CTIA mobile traffic (US only): 69 PB/month (2011) London School of Economics (Europe only): 3,600 PB/month (2012) TATA Communications: 1,600 PB/month (2013) Historical: NSFNET: 0.015 PB/month (1994)
On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 03:00:51PM -0400, Sean Donelan wrote:
I should have remembered, NANOG prefers to correct things. So here are several estimates about how much IP/Internet traffic is downloaded in a month. Does anyone have better numbers, or better souces of numbers that can be shared?
Arbor/Merit/Michigan Internet Observatory: 9,000 PB/month (2009) Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies: 7,500-12,000 PB/month (2009)
Cisco Visual Network Index: Total IP: 55,553 PB/month (2013) Fixed IP: 39,295 PB/month (2013) Managed IP: 14,679 PB/month (2013) Mobile Data: 1,578 PB/month (2013) Telegeography via ITU report: 44,000 PB/month (2012) National Security Agency: 55,680 PB/month (2013)
Individual providers/countries Australian Bureau of Statistics (AU only) : 184 PB/month (2012) AT&T Big Petabyte report (AT&T only): 990 PB/month (2013) CTIA mobile traffic (US only): 69 PB/month (2011) London School of Economics (Europe only): 3,600 PB/month (2012) TATA Communications: 1,600 PB/month (2013)
Historical: NSFNET: 0.015 PB/month (1994)
Well, the NSFnet numbers did not reflect CSnet or the DoD/ARPA follow on networks, of any of the other IPbased transmission systems of the era. And each of the sources you cite are undoubtedly correct and the best available. Two bits of missing data prevent you from reaching your goal of traffic loading, across all IPbased transmission systems. a) duplicate suppression in the existing datasets. b) access to datasets for unrepresented IPbased transmission systems. You seem to be asking for "b". Not sure how to correct for "a" without direct access to the raw data (and even then, there are issues). Other than more datasets, are you looking at traffic loading graphs, wiht the idea of projecting future loading trends? If so, I'd be interested in your methods since there is some interest in what might be called "the southern hemisphere" challange. /bill
On Aug 14, 2013, at 15:00 , Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> wrote:
I should have remembered, NANOG prefers to correct things. So here are several estimates about how much IP/Internet traffic is downloaded in a month. Does anyone have better numbers, or better souces of numbers that can be shared?
I think you are not defining things precisely enough to be corrected. What does "downloaded" mean? For instance: 1) If a Google server pulls traffic from another Google server in another datacenter over the Google backbone, is that "downloaded"? 2) How about if an an Akamai server pulls traffic from another Akamai server in the same building but two different networks? 3) How about if the two servers are on the same switch? 4) What if I am playing X-Box with another user on Comcast on the same head end? 5) Two different head ends in the same city? 6) Different cities? Etc. It is actually even harder than the above illustrates. Most people define "Mbps on the Internet" as inter-AS bits. But then what about Akamai AANP nodes, Google GGC nodes, Netflix Open Connect nodes, etc.? They are all inside the AS. Given that Akamai claims to be 20% of all broadband traffic, Google is on the same order, and NF claims to be 30% of US peak-evening traffic, it seems like it would be foolish to ignore this traffic. I could go on, but you get the point. Definitions are a bitch. Once you define what you mean by "how bit is the Internet", I'll be happy to spout off about how big it is. :) All that said: My back-of-the-envelope math says the Internet is order of 1 exabyte/day, as defined by my own rules on what counts as "the Internet"[*]. I could easily be wrong, but you asked. -- TTFN, patrick [*] I count Company-to-Company traffic. This is _mostly_ inter-AS traffic, but on-net nodes (e.g. Akamai, Google, NF) -> Provider _do_ count. Things like Google -> Google over Google backbone do not count. Things like as701 -> as702 would count, but not as701 -> as701, even if the traffic is between two single-homed customers. It is a weird definition, but that's how I define it. (Although I may be biased, since counting only inter-AS traffic leaves off $SOME_PERCENTAGE of the traffic from my company.)
Arbor/Merit/Michigan Internet Observatory: 9,000 PB/month (2009) Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies: 7,500-12,000 PB/month (2009)
Cisco Visual Network Index: Total IP: 55,553 PB/month (2013) Fixed IP: 39,295 PB/month (2013) Managed IP: 14,679 PB/month (2013) Mobile Data: 1,578 PB/month (2013) Telegeography via ITU report: 44,000 PB/month (2012) National Security Agency: 55,680 PB/month (2013)
Individual providers/countries Australian Bureau of Statistics (AU only) : 184 PB/month (2012) AT&T Big Petabyte report (AT&T only): 990 PB/month (2013) CTIA mobile traffic (US only): 69 PB/month (2011) London School of Economics (Europe only): 3,600 PB/month (2012) TATA Communications: 1,600 PB/month (2013)
Historical: NSFNET: 0.015 PB/month (1994)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Patrick W. Gilmore" <patrick@ianai.net>
All that said: My back-of-the-envelope math says the Internet is order of 1 exabyte/day, as defined by my own rules on what counts as "the Internet"[*]. I could easily be wrong, but you asked.
Which means that you could get somewhere between 11 and 17 days (depending on how far off my math was) worth of all of that onto LTO-5 carts and load them on a 747F. Where you'd fly them to, I'm not sure. http://baylink.pitas.com/20110516.html#747F Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA #natog +1 727 647 1274
On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 8:24 PM, Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com> wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Patrick W. Gilmore" <patrick@ianai.net>
All that said: My back-of-the-envelope math says the Internet is order of 1 exabyte/day, as defined by my own rules on what counts as "the Internet"[*]. I could easily be wrong, but you asked.
Which means that you could get somewhere between 11 and 17 days (depending on how far off my math was) worth of all of that onto LTO-5 carts and load them on a 747F. Where you'd fly them to, I'm not sure.
Unless you add in de-dup, in which case it probably comes down to about 10 carts per day. After all, we all know that 90% of that 1 exabyte/day is just the same 3 cat videos on Youtube... Scott
so true On 8/14/2013 10:10 PM, Scott Howard wrote:
On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 8:24 PM, Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com> wrote:
From: "Patrick W. Gilmore" <patrick@ianai.net> All that said: My back-of-the-envelope math says the Internet is order of 1 exabyte/day, as defined by my own rules on what counts as "the Internet"[*]. I could easily be wrong, but you asked. Which means that you could get somewhere between 11 and 17 days (depending on how far off my math was) worth of all of that onto LTO-5 carts and load
----- Original Message ----- them on a 747F. Where you'd fly them to, I'm not sure.
Unless you add in de-dup, in which case it probably comes down to about 10 carts per day. After all, we all know that 90% of that 1 exabyte/day is just the same 3 cat videos on Youtube...
Scott
On Wed, 14 Aug 2013, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
It is actually even harder than the above illustrates. Most people define "Mbps on the Internet" as inter-AS bits. But then what about Akamai AANP nodes, Google GGC nodes, Netflix Open Connect nodes, etc.? They are all inside the AS. Given that Akamai claims to be 20% of all broadband traffic, Google is on the same order, and NF claims to be 30% of US peak-evening traffic, it seems like it would be foolish to ignore this traffic.
I could go on, but you get the point. Definitions are a bitch.
Some of that may help explain why the Internet traffic estimates seem to be too high or too low since about 2007. The primary data sources for the Internet traffic estimates seem to be mostly Internet backbones and Internet exchange points. I hadn't been paying attention until I looked at a bunch of companies' investor filings this week because the size of the Internet was in the news. If you add up the percentages that companies are telling investors and policy makers, you end up with more than 100%. Most of the companies' investor reports don't explain % of what. But the few that do, end up pointing back to the same traffic forecast reports. That doesn't even get to the "long tail" of small providers that don't report anything. Either there is a lot of traffic missing, or market concentration is much greater than assumed.
On Aug 15, 2013, at 00:19 , Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> wrote:
On Wed, 14 Aug 2013, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
It is actually even harder than the above illustrates. Most people define "Mbps on the Internet" as inter-AS bits. But then what about Akamai AANP nodes, Google GGC nodes, Netflix Open Connect nodes, etc.? They are all inside the AS. Given that Akamai claims to be 20% of all broadband traffic, Google is on the same order, and NF claims to be 30% of US peak-evening traffic, it seems like it would be foolish to ignore this traffic.
I could go on, but you get the point. Definitions are a bitch.
Some of that may help explain why the Internet traffic estimates seem to be too high or too low since about 2007. The primary data sources for the Internet traffic estimates seem to be mostly Internet backbones and Internet exchange points.
I hadn't been paying attention until I looked at a bunch of companies' investor filings this week because the size of the Internet was in the news. If you add up the percentages that companies are telling investors and policy makers, you end up with more than 100%. Most of the companies' investor reports don't explain % of what. But the few that do, end up pointing back to the same traffic forecast reports. That doesn't even get to the "long tail" of small providers that don't report anything.
Either there is a lot of traffic missing, or market concentration is much greater than assumed.
I am not at all surprised the sum of percentages is > 100. User on Joe's-DSL-and-Bait store sends a packet up through Mary's-backbone-and-coffee shop to Bill's-other-transit-and-sandwich cart which finally lands on Comcast. (Didn't see that coming, did you? :) All four networks are going to claim that packet, but a true accounting of "petabytes downloaded per day" will only count it once. -- TTFN, patrick
i think of cdns as simpler. aside from the nyt-core-to-cdn traffic, they're just as if the nyt had connectivity to the provider(s) which embedded the cache. they are not another layer of traffic, but rather just traffic for the provider(s) in which they embedded. randy
Perhaps more interesting than bytes on backbones would be the median distance to an Internet-connected device. -glen
You'd almost think this was a technology mailing list given some of the answers... (ohh.. wait!) How about this - the size of the Internet is just short of 3 billion. That's the number of people that have access to it. To me, that's a far more telling number than anything around IP address or Exabytes of data. Scott
I agree, Librarys of Congress / second is the standard notation for bandwidth. -Blake On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 11:30 AM, Scott Howard <scott@doc.net.au> wrote:
You'd almost think this was a technology mailing list given some of the answers... (ohh.. wait!)
How about this - the size of the Internet is just short of 3 billion.
That's the number of people that have access to it. To me, that's a far more telling number than anything around IP address or Exabytes of data.
Scott
What Congress ? We have to be very careful with this the ITU may complain the we are taking a US centric approach to the subject and the EU will debate for months on the definition of "Library" then ICANN will initiate a PDP to figure how to associate Library with Congress after the SSAC says it is safe to do so, and after 10 years of public consultation and 50 conferences in exotic places we may find that the definition is outdated and the UN will call a panel of experts to devise why the Internet became several orders of magnitude bigger. At that time Vint will be sending 4D tweets via the galactic network from Pluto -Jorge On Aug 15, 2013, at 11:55 AM, Blake Dunlap <ikiris@gmail.com> wrote:
I agree, Librarys of Congress / second is the standard notation for bandwidth.
-Blake
On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 11:30 AM, Scott Howard <scott@doc.net.au> wrote:
You'd almost think this was a technology mailing list given some of the answers... (ohh.. wait!)
How about this - the size of the Internet is just short of 3 billion.
That's the number of people that have access to it. To me, that's a far more telling number than anything around IP address or Exabytes of data.
Scott
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jorge Amodio" <jmamodio@gmail.com>
What Congress ? We have to be very careful with this the ITU may complain the we are taking a US centric approach to the subject and the EU will debate for months on the definition of "Library" then ICANN will initiate a PDP to figure how to associate Library with Congress after the SSAC says it is safe to do so, and after 10 years of public consultation and 50 conferences in exotic places we may find that the definition is outdated and the UN will call a panel of experts to devise why the Internet became several orders of magnitude bigger.
At that time Vint will be sending 4D tweets via the galactic network from Pluto
C'mon guys; Whacky Weekend doesn't start til 3pm ET Fridays, except when Friday is a US Federal holiday... Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA #natog +1 727 647 1274
On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 12:30:24PM -0400, Scott Howard wrote:
How about this - the size of the Internet is just short of 3 billion.
That's the number of people that have access to it. To me, that's a far more telling number than anything around IP address or Exabytes of data.
Sure enough -- but people might be no longer the prime movers and shakers, with increased automation.
I know the exact size: Infinite. When I was in the university I was downloading many things at the night, while the whole internet bandwith was wasted (hehehehe). Many times my wget -r -l 32 got stuck on things like CGI's that point to itself creating a infinite loop. This was in 2002, but probably still exist many CGI's like this one. I imagine spider programmers have many fun similar histories, of websites that seems "infinite" to the spider. -- -- ℱin del ℳensaje.
All this goes to the point that the original question was poorly worded and I daresay ill-conceived. There's no "one number" or "one metric", much less "one definition". It all depends on what the real question is that you're trying to answer and why. There is plenty of room for study; though it's necessary to start with some circumscribed question. Of course the answers you may get won't likely then be readily applicable to answering some other question that may come in the future. Tony On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 12:30 PM, Scott Howard <scott@doc.net.au> wrote:
You'd almost think this was a technology mailing list given some of the answers... (ohh.. wait!)
How about this - the size of the Internet is just short of 3 billion.
That's the number of people that have access to it. To me, that's a far more telling number than anything around IP address or Exabytes of data.
Scott
One could say that the size of the internet is, up to isomorphism, 2; very precise but as useful as you predict. -- Mike On Aug 15, 2013, at 6:04 PM, Tony Tauber <ttauber@1-4-5.net> wrote:
All this goes to the point that the original question was poorly worded and I daresay ill-conceived. There's no "one number" or "one metric", much less "one definition". It all depends on what the real question is that you're trying to answer and why.
There is plenty of room for study; though it's necessary to start with some circumscribed question. Of course the answers you may get won't likely then be readily applicable to answering some other question that may come in the future.
Tony
On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 12:30 PM, Scott Howard <scott@doc.net.au> wrote:
You'd almost think this was a technology mailing list given some of the answers... (ohh.. wait!)
How about this - the size of the Internet is just short of 3 billion.
That's the number of people that have access to it. To me, that's a far more telling number than anything around IP address or Exabytes of data.
Scott
On Aug 14, 2013, at 3:27 PM, Patrick W. Gilmore <patrick@ianai.net> wrote:
Once you define what you mean by "how bit is the Internet", I'll be happy to spout off about how big it is. :)
Arbitrary definition time: A Internet host is one that can send and receive packets directly with at least one far end device addressed out of RIR managed IPv4 or IPv6 space. That means behind a NAT counts, behind a firewall counts, but a true private network (two PC's into an L2 switch with no other connections) does not, even if they use IP protocols. Note that devices behind a pure L3 proxy do not count, but the L3 proxy itself counts. Now, take those Internet hosts and create a graph where each node has a binary state, forwards packets or does not forward packets the result is a set of edge nodes that do not forward packets. The simple case is an end user PC, the complex case may be something like a server in a data center that while connected to multiple networks does not forward any packets, and is an edge node on all of the networks to which it is attached. To me, "all Internet" traffic is the sum of all "in" traffic on all edge nodes. Note if I did my definition carefully out = in - (packet loss + undeliverable), which means on the scale of the global Internet I suspect out == in, when rounded off. So please, carry on and spout off as to how big that is, I think an estimate would be very interesting. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
If devices behind an L3 proxy generate packets that end in the "public" Internet or if they get packets originated there, IMHO those devices are also part of the Internet not just the proxy, and you also may have that proxy for particular protocols but not all. -Jorge On Aug 15, 2013, at 9:05 AM, Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org> wrote:
That means behind a NAT counts, behind a firewall counts, but a true private network (two PC's into an L2 switch with no other connections) does not, even if they use IP protocols. Note that devices behind a pure L3 proxy do not count, but the L3 proxy itself counts.
Jorge - CPB49 (Certified Packet Butcher)
On Aug 15, 2013, at 10:05 , Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org> wrote:
On Aug 14, 2013, at 3:27 PM, Patrick W. Gilmore <patrick@ianai.net> wrote:
Once you define what you mean by "how bit is the Internet", I'll be happy to spout off about how big it is. :)
Arbitrary definition time: A Internet host is one that can send and receive packets directly with at least one far end device addressed out of RIR managed IPv4 or IPv6 space.
That means behind a NAT counts, behind a firewall counts, but a true private network (two PC's into an L2 switch with no other connections) does not, even if they use IP protocols. Note that devices behind a pure L3 proxy do not count, but the L3 proxy itself counts.
Now, take those Internet hosts and create a graph where each node has a binary state, forwards packets or does not forward packets the result is a set of edge nodes that do not forward packets. The simple case is an end user PC, the complex case may be something like a server in a data center that while connected to multiple networks does not forward any packets, and is an edge node on all of the networks to which it is attached.
To me, "all Internet" traffic is the sum of all "in" traffic on all edge nodes. Note if I did my definition carefully out = in - (packet loss + undeliverable), which means on the scale of the global Internet I suspect out == in, when rounded off.
I have a feeling you flipped "in" & "out" in that formula.
So please, carry on and spout off as to how big that is, I think an estimate would be very interesting.
Spout off time: My laptop at home is an edge node under the definition above, despite being behind a NAT. My home NAS is as well. When I back up my laptop to my NAS over my home network, that traffic would be counted as "Internet" traffic by your definition. I have a feeling that does not come close to matching the mental model most people have in their head of "Internet traffic". But maybe I'm confused. -- TTFN, patrick
On Aug 15, 2013, at 1:27 PM, Patrick W. Gilmore <patrick@ianai.net> wrote:
My laptop at home is an edge node under the definition above, despite being behind a NAT. My home NAS is as well. When I back up my laptop to my NAS over my home network, that traffic would be counted as "Internet" traffic by your definition.
I have a feeling that does not come close to matching the mental model most people have in their head of "Internet traffic". But maybe I'm confused.
It matches my mental model. Your network is connected to the Internet, that's traffic between two hosts, it's Internet traffic. Let's take the same two machines, but I own one and you own one, and let's put them on the same network behind a NAT just like your home, but at a coffee shop. Rather than backups we're both running bit torrent and our two machines exchange data. That's Internet traffic, isn't it? Two unrelated people talking over the network? They just happen to be on the same LAN. My definition was arbitrary, so feel free to argue another arbitrary definition is more useful in some way, but for my arbitrary definition you've applied the rules correct, and I would argue it's the right way to think about things. In a broad english sense "IP packets traversing an Internet connected network are Internet traffic". It's all graph cross sections. "Peering" volume totals a set of particular links in the graph, omitting traffic from your laptop to your file server, or your NAS to your laptop. My model attempts to isolate every edge on the graph, and generate the total sum of IP traffic crossing any Internet connected network, which would always include all forms of local caches (Akamai, Google, Netflix) and even your NAT. I think that's a more interesting number, and a number that's easier to count and defend than say a peering or "backbone" number. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
Is internal DNS considered to be in the same realm? I agree with you, but I'm not totally sure there is a straight forward answer here. Device connected to internet, sends query (same as would be over the internet) to local DNS service. Is that an Internet transaction? On 8/15/13 1:10 PM, "Leo Bicknell" <bicknell@ufp.org> wrote:
On Aug 15, 2013, at 1:27 PM, Patrick W. Gilmore <patrick@ianai.net> wrote:
My laptop at home is an edge node under the definition above, despite being behind a NAT. My home NAS is as well. When I back up my laptop to my NAS over my home network, that traffic would be counted as "Internet" traffic by your definition.
I have a feeling that does not come close to matching the mental model most people have in their head of "Internet traffic". But maybe I'm confused.
It matches my mental model. Your network is connected to the Internet, that's traffic between two hosts, it's Internet traffic.
Let's take the same two machines, but I own one and you own one, and let's put them on the same network behind a NAT just like your home, but at a coffee shop. Rather than backups we're both running bit torrent and our two machines exchange data.
That's Internet traffic, isn't it? Two unrelated people talking over the network? They just happen to be on the same LAN.
My definition was arbitrary, so feel free to argue another arbitrary definition is more useful in some way, but for my arbitrary definition you've applied the rules correct, and I would argue it's the right way to think about things. In a broad english sense "IP packets traversing an Internet connected network are Internet traffic".
It's all graph cross sections. "Peering" volume totals a set of particular links in the graph, omitting traffic from your laptop to your file server, or your NAS to your laptop. My model attempts to isolate every edge on the graph, and generate the total sum of IP traffic crossing any Internet connected network, which would always include all forms of local caches (Akamai, Google, Netflix) and even your NAT. I think that's a more interesting number, and a number that's easier to count and defend than say a peering or "backbone" number.
-- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
I neglected to say one additional thing which I think may be worth reading before replying. I have always held the opinion that internet traffic isn't internet traffic until it hits the Internet, which I defined as two or more autonomous systems functioning on their own but possessing the ability to relay information between the two. I'm pretty sure that if you have a single network, you couldn't label it "inter" unless "inter" was between yourself - and then you have a network.. Not an internetwork. Maybe?? :) On 8/15/13 1:10 PM, "Leo Bicknell" <bicknell@ufp.org> wrote:
On Aug 15, 2013, at 1:27 PM, Patrick W. Gilmore <patrick@ianai.net> wrote:
My laptop at home is an edge node under the definition above, despite being behind a NAT. My home NAS is as well. When I back up my laptop to my NAS over my home network, that traffic would be counted as "Internet" traffic by your definition.
I have a feeling that does not come close to matching the mental model most people have in their head of "Internet traffic". But maybe I'm confused.
It matches my mental model. Your network is connected to the Internet, that's traffic between two hosts, it's Internet traffic.
Let's take the same two machines, but I own one and you own one, and let's put them on the same network behind a NAT just like your home, but at a coffee shop. Rather than backups we're both running bit torrent and our two machines exchange data.
That's Internet traffic, isn't it? Two unrelated people talking over the network? They just happen to be on the same LAN.
My definition was arbitrary, so feel free to argue another arbitrary definition is more useful in some way, but for my arbitrary definition you've applied the rules correct, and I would argue it's the right way to think about things. In a broad english sense "IP packets traversing an Internet connected network are Internet traffic".
It's all graph cross sections. "Peering" volume totals a set of particular links in the graph, omitting traffic from your laptop to your file server, or your NAS to your laptop. My model attempts to isolate every edge on the graph, and generate the total sum of IP traffic crossing any Internet connected network, which would always include all forms of local caches (Akamai, Google, Netflix) and even your NAT. I think that's a more interesting number, and a number that's easier to count and defend than say a peering or "backbone" number.
-- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
On Thu, 15 Aug 2013 20:48:53 -0000, Warren Bailey said:
I neglected to say one additional thing which I think may be worth reading before replying. I have always held the opinion that internet traffic isn't internet traffic until it hits the Internet, which I defined as two or more autonomous systems functioning on their own but possessing the
So bittorrent packets from my computer to some other computer that also happens to belong to a Comcast subscriber aren't Internet traffic? But other packets to another Comcast subscriber that happen to cross an AS boundary are?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Warren Bailey" <wbailey@satelliteintelligencegroup.com>
I neglected to say one additional thing which I think may be worth reading before replying. I have always held the opinion that internet traffic isn't internet traffic until it hits the Internet, which I defined as two or more autonomous systems functioning on their own but possessing the ability to relay information between the two. I'm pretty sure that if you have a single network, you couldn't label it "inter" unless "inter" was between yourself - and then you have a network.. Not an internetwork.
I suspect that, to a first approximation, "traffic which passes through the edge of at least one AS" is probably what most people think of as 'Internet' traffic. As for your DNS question: the interior query isn't, per-se, but the repeated one from your resolver/proxy *is*. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA #natog +1 727 647 1274
On Aug 15, 2013, at 20:02 , Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com> wrote:
From: "Warren Bailey" <wbailey@satelliteintelligencegroup.com>
I neglected to say one additional thing which I think may be worth reading before replying. I have always held the opinion that internet traffic isn't internet traffic until it hits the Internet, which I defined as two or more autonomous systems functioning on their own but possessing the ability to relay information between the two. I'm pretty sure that if you have a single network, you couldn't label it "inter" unless "inter" was between yourself - and then you have a network.. Not an internetwork.
I suspect that, to a first approximation, "traffic which passes through the edge of at least one AS" is probably what most people think of as 'Internet' traffic.
As per my original post to this thread, that would remove all traffic from Akamai on-net nodes, Google's GGC nodes, Netflix's on-net Open Connect nodes, and many others. If you are a broadband network in many countries, that is well over half the traffic going down your customer's pipes. I think most people would alter their definition to count that traffic.
As for your DNS question: the interior query isn't, per-se, but the repeated one from your resolver/proxy *is*.
I don't think the type of packet (DNS, HTTP, SMTP, etc. or even TCP, IP, ICMP) should matter. -- TTFN, patrick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Patrick W. Gilmore" <patrick@ianai.net>
I suspect that, to a first approximation, "traffic which passes through the edge of at least one AS" is probably what most people think of as 'Internet' traffic.
As per my original post to this thread, that would remove all traffic from Akamai on-net nodes, Google's GGC nodes, Netflix's on-net Open Connect nodes, and many others.
If you are a broadband network in many countries, that is well over half the traffic going down your customer's pipes.
I think most people would alter their definition to count that traffic.
Ok, "to a zeroth approximation". That said: it depends on what you're trying to measure, as has been pointed out before: the entire *point* of edge caching is "to get all that duplicated traffic 'off of the Internet'," no?
As for your DNS question: the interior query isn't, per-se, but the repeated one from your resolver/proxy *is*.
I don't think the type of packet (DNS, HTTP, SMTP, etc. or even TCP, IP, ICMP) should matter.
The rest of those are generally not application-level proxied the way DNS is with most consumer edge NAT routers. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA #natog +1 727 647 1274
----- Original Message -----
From: "Leo Bicknell" <bicknell@ufp.org>
I have a feeling that does not come close to matching the mental model most people have in their head of "Internet traffic". But maybe I'm confused.
It matches my mental model. Your network is connected to the Internet, that's traffic between two hosts, it's Internet traffic.
Let's take the same two machines, but I own one and you own one, and let's put them on the same network behind a NAT just like your home, but at a coffee shop. Rather than backups we're both running bit torrent and our two machines exchange data.
That's Internet traffic, isn't it? Two unrelated people talking over the network? They just happen to be on the same LAN.
"Internet traffic is traffic which leaves and/or arrives at your machine in a session with some other machine which is on a network physically or administratively disjoint from the one your network is on." How's that? I think it solves both your and Patrick's requirements. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA #natog +1 727 647 1274
Hi, On 14/08/13 9:00 , Sean Donelan wrote:
I should have remembered, NANOG prefers to correct things. So here are several estimates about how much IP/Internet traffic is downloaded in a month. Does anyone have better numbers, or better souces of numbers that can be shared?
No source, but a pretty quote: "In the near future, hourly Internet traffic will exceed the Internet’s annual traffic in the year 2000." http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/programs/economic-growth/bracing-for-th... Vesna
One segment is the number of people on the planet with a mobile device that can connect to the Internet? Throw in laptops, workstations, servers, routers, toasters, etc and the number starts to get pretty big. The NSA will need some more hard drives. lol ** Of the 6 billion cell phones in use, only around 1.1 billion of them are mobile-broadband devices. ** http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/mobile-phone-world-population-2014 -Alby On 8/14/2013 11:10 AM, Alex wrote:
Current size is HUGE and growing at a phenomenal speed. Public IP networks...just look at ARIN, RIPE,etc and see how many IPs there are left. Private networks and private IPs...well that is anyone's guess.
There are no estimates because everything changes rather fast and noone can keep up with all this stuff. The only thing you could have a really good estimate are the resources used by your company and thats about it.
On 8/14/2013 5:32 PM, Sean Donelan wrote:
Researchers have complained for years about the lack of good statistics about the internet for a couple fo decades, since the end of NSFNET statistics.
What are the current estimates about the size of the Internet, all IP networks including managed IP and private IP, and all telecommunications including analog voice, video, sensor data, etc?
CAIDA, ITU, Telegeography and some vendors like Cisco have released forecasts and estimates. There are occasional pieces of information stated by companies in their investor documents (SEC 10-K, etc).
On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 10:10 AM, Alex <dreamwaverfx@yahoo.com> wrote:
Current size is HUGE and growing at a phenomenal speed. Public IP networks...just look at ARIN, RIPE,etc and see how many IPs there are left. Private networks and private IPs...well that is anyone's guess.
There are no estimates because everything changes rather fast and noone can keep up with all this stuff. The only thing you could have a really good estimate are the resources used by your company and thats about it.
Your best bet for estimating the true size of the Internet would probably require access to Google, Bing, et al. search engine client access datasets, and number of files / sites crawled datasets; I wouldn't be surprised if they already had this data -- and use cookies as a sieve to accurately separate higher-volume single users from multiple NAT'ed users. Predict the average client's search volume, and infer a predicted number of NAT'ed users per IP accessing search over time. Then enumerate every domain name registered in every single gTLD and ccTLD, and count the number of uniques -- excluding ones with nameservers listed that are used for /dev/null domains which just display advertising. Is the number of network nodes on the internet more interesting than the number of exabytes of unique public data able to be downloaded..... or the number of SD cards and amount of download time required to backup the internet? :) -- -JH
Don't think I've seen it mentioned yet (but then I've stopped reading a lot of this thread): Akamai publishes a "state of the net" report periodically, with lots of statistics. http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/ Miles Fidelman -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
Pretty big, but they gotta keep it trimmed down to fit on a floppy disk. Details within -> http://www.cidr-report.org -James -----Original Message----- From: Sean Donelan [mailto:sean@donelan.com] Sent: Wednesday, August 14, 2013 7:32 AM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: How big is the Internet? Researchers have complained for years about the lack of good statistics about the internet for a couple fo decades, since the end of NSFNET statistics. What are the current estimates about the size of the Internet, all IP networks including managed IP and private IP, and all telecommunications including analog voice, video, sensor data, etc? CAIDA, ITU, Telegeography and some vendors like Cisco have released forecasts and estimates. There are occasional pieces of information stated by companies in their investor documents (SEC 10-K, etc).
On (2013-08-14 10:32 -0400), Sean Donelan wrote:
What are the current estimates about the size of the Internet, all IP networks including managed IP and private IP, and all telecommunications including analog voice, video, sensor data, etc?
One interesting datapoint might be how many OUI have been allocated, it's about 18k, 2**24 potential MAC addresses in each, so we have 300billion MAC addresses, which is smaller number than what I would have expected. -- ++ytti
On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 10:32:13AM -0400, Sean Donelan wrote:
Researchers have complained for years about the lack of good statistics about the internet for a couple fo decades, since the end of NSFNET statistics.
What are the current estimates about the size of the Internet, all IP networks including managed IP and private IP, and all telecommunications including analog voice, video, sensor data, etc?
CAIDA, ITU, Telegeography and some vendors like Cisco have released forecasts and estimates. There are occasional pieces of information stated by companies in their investor documents (SEC 10-K, etc).
thats easy... the number of allocated IPv4 /32s and the number of allocated IPv6 /64s. By definition, private networks (RFC 1918) space is not part of the Internet. Or, is your question actually the absolute number of globally reachable IP addresses at any given instant? (reachable from where?) Or do you mean anything that might have an IP address associated with it at some time in its existance? Clarity would be helpful if you want a repeatable answer. /bill
"This big" has been a pretty accurate answer over the years -Jorge On Aug 14, 2013, at 9:32 AM, Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> wrote:
Researchers have complained for years about the lack of good statistics about the internet for a couple fo decades, since the end of NSFNET statistics.
What are the current estimates about the size of the Internet, all IP networks including managed IP and private IP, and all telecommunications including analog voice, video, sensor data, etc?
CAIDA, ITU, Telegeography and some vendors like Cisco have released forecasts and estimates. There are occasional pieces of information stated by companies in their investor documents (SEC 10-K, etc).
Not as big as the one that got away... (IPv6) On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 10:32 AM, Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> wrote:
Researchers have complained for years about the lack of good statistics about the internet for a couple fo decades, since the end of NSFNET statistics.
What are the current estimates about the size of the Internet, all IP networks including managed IP and private IP, and all telecommunications including analog voice, video, sensor data, etc?
CAIDA, ITU, Telegeography and some vendors like Cisco have released forecasts and estimates. There are occasional pieces of information stated by companies in their investor documents (SEC 10-K, etc).
-- Tim:>
In message <7F58DB7C-702A-4D2D-AD50-6DDF984399E7@gmail.com>, Jorge Amodio writes:
IPV6 makes it wider
-Jorge
On Aug 14, 2013, at 12:51 PM, Tim Durack <tdurack@gmail.com> wrote:
Not as big as the one that got away... (IPv6)
10^12 km^3 -- Mark Andrews, ISC 1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742 INTERNET: marka@isc.org
To paraphrase Douglas Adams... "The Internet is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space!" Scott On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 10:32 AM, Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> wrote:
Researchers have complained for years about the lack of good statistics about the internet for a couple fo decades, since the end of NSFNET statistics.
What are the current estimates about the size of the Internet, all IP networks including managed IP and private IP, and all telecommunications including analog voice, video, sensor data, etc?
CAIDA, ITU, Telegeography and some vendors like Cisco have released forecasts and estimates. There are occasional pieces of information stated by companies in their investor documents (SEC 10-K, etc).
On 8/14/2013 11:29 AM, Scott Howard wrote:
To paraphrase Douglas Adams...
"The Internet is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space!"
Scott
So the correct answer is 42?
On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 10:32 AM, Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> wrote:
Researchers have complained for years about the lack of good statistics about the internet for a couple fo decades, since the end of NSFNET statistics.
What are the current estimates about the size of the Internet, all IP networks including managed IP and private IP, and all telecommunications including analog voice, video, sensor data, etc?
CAIDA, ITU, Telegeography and some vendors like Cisco have released forecasts and estimates. There are occasional pieces of information stated by companies in their investor documents (SEC 10-K, etc).
.
On 08/14/13 15:00, Roy wrote:
On 8/14/2013 11:29 AM, Scott Howard wrote:
To paraphrase Douglas Adams...
"The Internet is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space!"
Scott
So the correct answer is 42?
On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 10:32 AM, Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> wrote:
Researchers have complained for years about the lack of good statistics about the internet for a couple fo decades, since the end of NSFNET statistics.
Now finally we have the answer. And we are still working on the correct question(if that's possible)!
-- Lyle Giese LCR Computer Services, Inc Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. Benjamin Franklin 1775
According to The IT Crowd... http://vinipsmaker.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/the_internet_it_crowd.gif That big. On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 7:32 AM, Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> wrote:
Researchers have complained for years about the lack of good statistics about the internet for a couple fo decades, since the end of NSFNET statistics.
What are the current estimates about the size of the Internet, all IP networks including managed IP and private IP, and all telecommunications including analog voice, video, sensor data, etc?
CAIDA, ITU, Telegeography and some vendors like Cisco have released forecasts and estimates. There are occasional pieces of information stated by companies in their investor documents (SEC 10-K, etc).
-- Wayne Wenthin Technology Services Cascade Technology Alliance (CTA North - Multnomah ESD) Office: 503.257.1562 Cell: 360.818.4283
You guys are cracking me up and I'm getting odd stares. Now stop it. I've got to get this "internet" thing on a CDROM for my boss by 5p so he can review it tonight... On Aug 14, 2013, at 1:43 PM, "Wayne Wenthin" <wayne.wenthin@cascadetech.org> wrote:
According to The IT Crowd...
http://vinipsmaker.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/the_internet_it_crowd.gif
That big.
On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 7:32 AM, Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> wrote:
Researchers have complained for years about the lack of good statistics about the internet for a couple fo decades, since the end of NSFNET statistics.
What are the current estimates about the size of the Internet, all IP networks including managed IP and private IP, and all telecommunications including analog voice, video, sensor data, etc?
CAIDA, ITU, Telegeography and some vendors like Cisco have released forecasts and estimates. There are occasional pieces of information stated by companies in their investor documents (SEC 10-K, etc).
-- Wayne Wenthin Technology Services Cascade Technology Alliance (CTA North - Multnomah ESD) Office: 503.257.1562 Cell: 360.818.4283
________________________________ This email message and any attachments are for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and contain confidential and/or privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply e-mail and destroy all copies of the original message and any attachments.
On 8/14/13 7:32 AM, Sean Donelan wrote:
Researchers have complained for years about the lack of good statistics about the internet for a couple fo decades, since the end of NSFNET statistics.
What are the current estimates about the size of the Internet, all IP networks including managed IP and private IP, and all telecommunications including analog voice, video, sensor data, etc?
CAIDA, ITU, Telegeography and some vendors like Cisco have released forecasts and estimates. There are occasional pieces of information stated by companies in their investor documents (SEC 10-K, etc).
I stumbled on (an) ANT the other day. Very interesting, esp. the part about tracking the growth of Google. I've only made a cursory review over some of the projects but I think it is somewhat relevant to your research, and I'm sure there are many other similar .edu projects you could cull together for a rough estimate. http://ant.isi.edu/blog/ http://www.isi.edu/ant/index.html OPTE seems to have gone stale, too bad. Mapping the internet in a single day... instant gratification ! http://www.opte.org/status/ http://opte.org/history/ Regards, --Jason
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sean Donelan" <sean@donelan.com>
What are the current estimates about the size of the Internet, all IP networks including managed IP and private IP, and all telecommunications including analog voice, video, sensor data, etc?
I can't decide, Sean, whether it's obvious or amusing that when I dug back to the beginning of this thread, it would be you who'd asked. (It says some things I don't want to know about how email clients attribute these days, but that's neither here nor there.) Did you want that in "assigned IP addresses", "active IP addresses", "core routes", "core routes, deaggregated", "route miles of fiber", "aggregate bandwidth", or something else? I'm tempted to go with either "mind-bogglingly big" or "42", but since it's you, I'll assume you want an actual answer. Didn't someone recently redo the IPv4 census? Like last year? Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA #natog +1 727 647 1274
On 8/14/13 8:11 PM, Jay Ashworth wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sean Donelan" <sean@donelan.com>
What are the current estimates about the size of the Internet, all IP networks including managed IP and private IP, and all telecommunications including analog voice, video, sensor data, etc?
I can't decide, Sean, whether it's obvious or amusing that when I dug back to the beginning of this thread, it would be you who'd asked. (It says some things I don't want to know about how email clients attribute these days, but that's neither here nor there.)
Did you want that in "assigned IP addresses", "active IP addresses", "core routes", "core routes, deaggregated", "route miles of fiber", "aggregate bandwidth", or something else?
I'm tempted to go with either "mind-bogglingly big" or "42", but since it's you, I'll assume you want an actual answer.
Didn't someone recently redo the IPv4 census? Like last year?
We'll also need this data in units of number of Libraries of Congress. ~Seth
On Thu, 15 Aug 2013, Seth Mattinen wrote:
We'll also need this data in units of number of Libraries of Congress.
The researchers at the Library of Congress are more than happy to explain why you are wrong to attempt to use the Library of Congress as a unit of measure, and why the estimates being used are wrong. http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2011/07/transferring-libraries-of-c... along with several other blog posts over the years. But it doesn't seem to stop people from wanting to 1) know how big the Library of Congress is and 2) using it as a unit of measure. It seems odd that there are relatively good estimates for other communication networks and utilities; i.e. how big is the PSTN, how many television or radio stations, how much freight is carried by railroads, trucks and ships. But asking how big is the Internet, how much data does it carry, ends up with no answer. Even the researchers at the Library of Congress, if you give them enough beer and beg them enough, will eventually give you an estimate about the Library collection size as of the end of the last year. What so special about the Internet that it can't be measured?
On Aug 16, 2013, at 00:37 , Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> wrote:
On Thu, 15 Aug 2013, Seth Mattinen wrote:
We'll also need this data in units of number of Libraries of Congress.
The researchers at the Library of Congress are more than happy to explain why you are wrong to attempt to use the Library of Congress as a unit of measure, and why the estimates being used are wrong.
http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2011/07/transferring-libraries-of-c...
along with several other blog posts over the years.
But it doesn't seem to stop people from wanting to 1) know how big the Library of Congress is and 2) using it as a unit of measure.
It seems odd that there are relatively good estimates for other communication networks and utilities; i.e. how big is the PSTN, how many television or radio stations, how much freight is carried by railroads, trucks and ships. But asking how big is the Internet, how much data does it carry, ends up with no answer.
Even the researchers at the Library of Congress, if you give them enough beer and beg them enough, will eventually give you an estimate about the Library collection size as of the end of the last year.
What so special about the Internet that it can't be measured?
Complete lack of regulation, and in many cases, even billing. You cannot make a call on the PSTN without someone getting money from someone else and a CDR (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_detail_record>) being created. Television & radio stations are trivially countable and probably literally a a dozen or more orders of magnitude off the number of packets on the Internet. Railroads are similarly tiny in number and bill for freight. Roads are built by taxpayer dollars, so the gov't keeps a good account. Etc., etc. The Internet is the first world-wide "thing" that doesn't bill based on where you send something, what you are doing, why you do it, and in many cases, even how much you do. Moreover, anyone can set up anything on it without asking the gov't for permission. This has enabled the impossible growth curve seen the last 20 years, but also made it impossible to count, categorize, or control. Which pisses off some people (usually governments), but makes others (e.g. me!) all warm & fuzzy inside. -- TTFN, patrick P.S. I know you already knew the answer to the question, but I figured you wanted it answered when you asked, so I did.
On 8/16/2013 12:46 AM, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
On Aug 16, 2013, at 00:37 , Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> wrote:
On Thu, 15 Aug 2013, Seth Mattinen wrote:
We'll also need this data in units of number of Libraries of Congress. The researchers at the Library of Congress are more than happy to explain why you are wrong to attempt to use the Library of Congress as a unit of measure, and why the estimates being used are wrong.
http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2011/07/transferring-libraries-of-c...
along with several other blog posts over the years.
But it doesn't seem to stop people from wanting to 1) know how big the Library of Congress is and 2) using it as a unit of measure.
It seems odd that there are relatively good estimates for other communication networks and utilities; i.e. how big is the PSTN, how many television or radio stations, how much freight is carried by railroads, trucks and ships. But asking how big is the Internet, how much data does it carry, ends up with no answer.
Even the researchers at the Library of Congress, if you give them enough beer and beg them enough, will eventually give you an estimate about the Library collection size as of the end of the last year.
What so special about the Internet that it can't be measured? Complete lack of regulation, and in many cases, even billing.
You cannot make a call on the PSTN without someone getting money from someone else and a CDR (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_detail_record>) being created. Television & radio stations are trivially countable and probably literally a a dozen or more orders of magnitude off the number of packets on the Internet. Railroads are similarly tiny in number and bill for freight. Roads are built by taxpayer dollars, so the gov't keeps a good account. Etc., etc.
The Internet is the first world-wide "thing" that doesn't bill based on where you send something, what you are doing, why you do it, and in many cases, even how much you do. Moreover, anyone can set up anything on it without asking the gov't for permission.
This has enabled the impossible growth curve seen the last 20 years, but also made it impossible to count, categorize, or control. Which pisses off some people (usually governments), but makes others (e.g. me!) all warm & fuzzy inside.
That's probably the best answer, but I'd add that nobody has gathered sufficient quantities of beer to give to the for-profit companies that are in a position to gather the requested data. If somebody wants to collect that much beer, what would the rest of us drink? -- Dave
On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 12:37:20AM -0400, Sean Donelan wrote:
Even the researchers at the Library of Congress, if you give them enough beer and beg them enough, will eventually give you an estimate about the Library collection size as of the end of the last year.
What so special about the Internet that it can't be measured?
The problem is that is can be measured, along a large number variables. The LOC question, How Big? Might be linear shelf space, sqft, number of items, number of warehouses, number of employees, budget, etc. The base question, How Big needs a qualifier or two. Same with the Internet. How big makes no sense. How much traffic begs the question of measured from where. A unique attribute of IP based transport is that -as far as I know- there is no measurement point between -every- pair of nodes that might exchange traffic. And since the instrumentation does not exist, you'll never get the numbers. Select other vectors and the problem remains, the instrumentation is poor or non-existant. Any numbers that are derived are incomplete and/or estimates. Pick your poision. /bill
On Fri, 16 Aug 2013, bmanning@vacation.karoshi.com wrote:
On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 12:37:20AM -0400, Sean Donelan wrote:
Even the researchers at the Library of Congress, if you give them enough beer and beg them enough, will eventually give you an estimate about the Library collection size as of the end of the last year.
What so special about the Internet that it can't be measured?
The problem is that is can be measured, along a large number variables.
The LOC question, How Big? Might be linear shelf space, sqft, number of items, number of warehouses, number of employees, budget, etc. The base question, How Big needs a qualifier or two.
So, in the context of the LOC question about using it as a unit of measurement for comparison with storage size or transmission volume; which of those things are information that can be transmitted or electronically stored? If I asked "how big is an elephant?" some zoologists would look for ways the question can't be answered like "elephants grow from birth to death, have different species, may have illnesses, have not measured every elephant, etc."; others might give an answer like "Adult male elephants usually stand ten to thirteen feet tall and can weigh seven to twenty-six thousand pounds. Females elephants tend to be smaller smaller."
Same with the Internet. How big makes no sense. How much traffic begs the question of measured from where. A unique attribute of IP based transport is that -as far as I know- there is no measurement point between -every- pair of nodes that might exchange traffic.
That is true of most transportation networks: roads do not have measurement points between every destination point, oceans do not have a measurement point between every port. Intangiable things like the "economy" don't have measurement points at every economic transaction. Yet there are relatively accepted estimates of the size Gross Domestic Product, annual miles driven on US Highways, shipping between countries.
And since the instrumentation does not exist, you'll never get the numbers.
Select other vectors and the problem remains, the instrumentation is poor or non-existant.
Any numbers that are derived are incomplete and/or estimates.
Pick your poision.
Ed Felten gave the keynote talk at Usenix Security this week. One of the examples he gave was a out-of-town friend asking a technologist for recommendations for a good resturant. Hilarity ensured. If you wonder why other people don't ask technologists for answers, Dr. Felten's talk is a good starting point.
participants (37)
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<<"tei''>>> -
Alex -
Anthony Williams -
Blake Dunlap -
bmanning＠vacation.karoshi.com -
Caruso, Anthony -
Clinton Popovich -
Dave Sparro -
Eugen Leitl -
Frank Habicht -
Gabriel Blanchard -
Glen Turner -
James Sink -
Jason Chambers -
Jay Ashworth -
Jimmy Hess -
John Osmon -
Jorge Amodio -
Leo Bicknell -
Lyle Giese -
Mark Andrews -
Michael Conlen -
Miles Fidelman -
Nick Khamis -
Patrick W. Gilmore -
Randy Bush -
Roy -
Saku Ytti -
Scott Howard -
Sean Donelan -
Seth Mattinen -
Tim Durack -
Tony Tauber -
Valdis.Kletnieks＠vt.edu -
Vesna Manojlovic -
Warren Bailey -
Wayne Wenthin