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.

Comments

Two main thoughts

[WillSeattle]

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!