You're assuming that the internet will persist in its current form, and just "scale up". I'd argue that, as network technology becomes useful for non-nerds, consumers will pay for packaged data services and not just for "access" to an expanded version of today's web-morass. These information services, e.g., entertainment, news, etc., will be big bandwidth burners. Simple economics will drive the providers of these high-bandwidth services to the edges of the network, and hence to a regional model for content distribution. Thus, the majority of bits, if not the majority of net "accesses" (one ten minute video stream will likely dominate a residential consumer's daily consumption) reaching consumers will be delivered regionally. You can see the beginnings of this trend in the proliferation of www-caching research, products, and services (e.g., the nlanr caching studies, Inktomi and Skycache). ISPs are already finding it economical to set up ad hoc "tiered" content distribution schemes to reduce their backbone bandwidth requirements. Under this model, the ISPs are themselves regionalizing content distribution; what was global traffic, once cached, becomes local. As the data services industry matures, and exands to serve the enormous residential consumer market, large volume content providers will follow this model, locating servers at regional sites to minimize their backbone costs. Of course, this blue-sky-ish sort of argument depends on the widespread deployment of high-speed last-mile access technologies, and the development of worthwhile services offerings. This will occur at different paces in different locales; yet its hard (for me, at least) to see a much different outcome in the long run. Tom twalton@dimension.net

"Pickett, David" writes:

...

1) More needs to be done to leverage locality of traffic

In the long run, why are we assuming there will be locality of traffic?

It is true that the old PSTN has locality of traffic, but it doesn't have flat rate pricing, or the usage patterns that the Internet has. I argue that users are rarely more likely to be trying to download a web page from near to their homes than from far away. If there is locality, it is probably weak, and in the long run would only account for a fraction of the traffic.

Perry