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International Internet Infrastructure Triples
bda writes: "TeleGeography has just published this year's statistics for international Internet infrastructure growth, aka how much capacity goes where. Worldwide, Internet bandwidth nearly tripled (174 percent growth), but behind it are some pretty big differences -- growth ranged from 90 percent (less than doubling) for Africa to 479 percent (almost sextupling) for Latin America. City-wise, the top interregional hubs connecting between continents were New York, London, Amsterdam, Paris, SF, Tokyo, Washington DC, Miami, Los Angeles, Copenhagen, in that order. So the Internet is still fairly U.S.-centric ... but still becoming less so. Asia-Pac's ratio of out-of-region to in-region international capacity went from 7:1 to 4:1; Lat Am's from 36:1 to 7:1. The most obvious factor in long-haul Internet bandwidth growth seems to be whether or not someone has plunged ahead and laid dark fiber. When we looked at trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific capacity, Internet capacity stayed pretty constant at 10 percent of what was theoretically possible over lit fiber." You can read the executive summary (pdf), or you can (gulp) pay $1,995 for the whole thing. That would work out to about 50 copies of the Atlas of Cyberspace.
The main things one gets from this are:
1. Europe is growing rapidly, but not pulling Africa along with it.
2. Asia/Pacific is moving from a US-centric model to a Pacific model centered in Japan and Australia.
Both of these are fairly good things for the Net, and the first has positive implications for Privacy rights and where the Net will change, as the US fails to take the lead on things such as opt-in email requirements and consumer privacy, but the EU provides and enforces them. This will be the major battle of the zeros decade, as well as the transparency and ubiquity of the Net in most European countries and their direct colonies.
The breakdown of the US-centric Pacific/Asian model is probably good, as it was a bad fit before, but has negative implications for Privacy and also for Piracy. However, it may lead to increased growth of open source computing, as these regions deal with both growth and a downturn in economic fortunes. The need for servers and Net components will increase, but pressure to drop prices will most certainly kill MSFT control of this area, which will help force open source into most transparent background Net technology.
Cool!
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
The bandwidth growth is great, but that doesn't mean it is being used.
What would be great is if we could see the comparative stats on increased bandwidth vs. the usage of clients.
Increased bandwidth doesn't necessarily mean an expansion of access to everyone in the world.
The article seems to send a message that a US-centric Internet is bad, even though other countries/continents are catching up. Umm, the Internet was invented by the DOD, and more or less just given to the (at first) US public, and then the world. At considerable expense, don't forget. For any country to complain about not having "equal access" to the Internet should basically shut up until they put in the money that the US put in initially. (Disregard the billions put into the infrastructure since then).
Don't get me wrong, I am glad that international connections, servers, and users are growing by leaps and bounds. The more connections in the world, that is more info that can be spread, more tolerance that can be learned, more history and purpose that can be learned. Cultures (sp?) intersect and learn from each other. The human race grows at a pace not ever, ever seen before!!
I just get very frustrated by people that say "Antartica only has a 4Kb connection to the Internet! Unfair!!! We deserve an OC-48 RIGHT NOW!"
I hope you see what I mean.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Bandwidth is like megahertz, it's an arbitrary number that may or may not be useful.
The broad-band providers maximized their customer experience by caching at their head-ends. The "massive bandwidth" of broadband was therefore useful, without the lag times that must be considered.
Even in a perfect network, the latency for data travel matters. How often are the LED's on your 56K modem pegged on by a datastream where your link is the limiting factor?
A 747 full of DAT's has truly awsome bandwidth, but the latency is deadly.
The beauty of this massive engorgement in fibers is that once layed, a fiber optic cable's capacity is limited only by the hardware at the end points. Any improvement in technology, such as WDM, multiplies the available bits-per-second without having to lay more fiber.
As places like NewYork and London and Tokyo reach a fiber glut, the rest of the world will follow. Just like telephones and electric power, "poor" places will simply get their access at a slower pace. But there are always alternatives, such as satellite, to get the information. It might not be in flashy graphics, or up-to-the-second, but "poor" areas have no demand for that to cover the costs anyway. That's why they're called "poor".
If you think that an area is under-served, then stand up and join or organize a group to lay the freaking fiber. Complaining all day won't put cables in the water/ground.
But when you do, think also of what it is you're connecting *to*, or you may end up connected to nothing anyone wants.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
I fail to see why the poster claim that the net is US centric. Half the city of the top hub lists are not in the US. Also, in the executive summary on the site, it claims the key backbone truck are London->New York (77.7 Gbps), SF->Tokyo (7.9) an Sao Paulo to Miami (3.4). This just shows that traffic/capacity to the US from Asia and South America is pretty non-significant compare to traffic from Europe. It also says that within Europe, half of the traffic is within Europe itself, while to the remaining half goes to the rest of the world. So, at least for Europe, US is certainly not the centre of their internet.