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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.
Iraq has Internet, but only for the military. It is illegal to even own a modem in Iraq. Faxes, copiers, typewriters, etc. have to be registered. Satellite dishes are banned, although people do assemble and camouflage them. Foreign magazines coming into the country are censored, often arriving with certain pages torn out. The government keeps very tight control of any news coming into the country. The internet would be harder to control, so it is banned. Saddam recently declared that the internet is a sinister tool used by governments for brainwashing people and spreading pornography.
Nizar Hamdoun, Iraq's retiring UN ambassador, in a recent interview, said that when he returns to Iraq, he will try to open internet access to the country. He thinks the internet is very useful, and would like Iraqi kids to enjoy the benefits. Hamdoun designed the Iraqi UN mission's web site.
Iraq has international telephone access, which is also often monitored. The network was targeted and damaged during the Gulf War and the recent bombing. So service is sporadic.
I want to know if all this extra bandwidthis being paid for or whether internationally the cost of internet bandwidth is dropping. Here in australia with the internet backbone provided by only to main companies we are still charged fairly restrictive bandwidth prices.
I currently have a permament 28.8kbs connection charged at AU18c a Mb. With the advent of a PPPoE switched network in our city it was meant to herald a new age of connectivity with streaming movies and megabandwidth available. Shure it may be available but they are charging pretty similar rates per meg to my current modem connection. Meaning I could run up a AU$500 bill in a matter of minutes downloading the debian iso's for example.
Shouldn't the increse of available bandwidth decrease the cost to the consumers?
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?
Ever since reading Edward Tufte's books on visualization of data, I've looked at graphs, charts, and diagrams such as those in this report with a much more critical eye. It really bothers me that people get away with distorting data so terribly. For example, take a look at that first chart of "Interregional Internet Bandwidth". The numbers seem to have almost nothing to do with how they displayed the data, aside from the general correlation between thickness of the line and the size of the number. Your eye is tricked into comparing the areas of some of the lines because of how absurdly thick the US / Europe one is. And the spread of data makes it impossible for the vague correlation of data to be meaningful. There's no way that Latin America / Europe line is 1/2000 of the thickness of the US / Europe line. It bothers me that "executives" will be making decisions based on poor data displays like this.
Steven N. Severinghaus
Wouldn't it be worthwhile for the researcher to add the Inner-European Interchanges, too? I remember from my time in Germany that FrankfurtLondon is a MAJOR Hub, for instance many English Providers have a direct peering at the DECIX. Same goes for the Netherlands and other countries. Now it depends on your routing, but many times you are being routed through other European countries first and then it very well matters how your interconnect with those countries works ...
"The fact that the infrastructure has gotten so big and so few of the truly UN-connected (i.e. non western countries, disadvantaged schools) have gotten connected in the meantime makes me relegate this infrastructure expansion to the trash bin with the dutch tulip craze."
...
Okay, fair enough, but a couple of paragraphs later
"It has to become like the car. People said the car wouldn't penetrate certain levels of society either you know."
Yes, exactly. These things always take time, and it's always the rich who get it first. Well, okay, the very first are the inventors (who are usually, themselves, reasonably well-off) but then, in order, it's:
1) The rich in rich countries
2) The rich in poor countries and the middle class in rich countries
3) The poor in rich countries and the (usually small) middle class in poor countries
4) Absolutely everybody
Note that the automobile is still going through this process -- I'd put it at about stage 3.5 -- but nobody denies the ubiquity of the automobile, or doubts that it will get even more ubiquitous in the future. Air travel is at about 2.7. Antibiotics, 3.9. Radio, 4. TV, just about exactly on 3. Etc. I'm sure I could come up with some other examples, but you get the idea. This is a technological growth pattern that is neither new nor unique to any one technology.
Internet connectivity I'd say is at about 2.5, which may not be all that great -- but considering that the idea of mass connection to the Net is only about two decades old by the most generous possible measure (counting Compuserve et seq as part of "the Net" -- if you only count the Internet as such, I'd say less than a decade, since 99% of the population had never heard of it before the advent of the WWW) it's not doing that badly. Unless things really go to hell for some reason, I predict stage 3 within the next few years and stage 4 no later than 2020.
So don't write off the Net. The "Bruce Sterling world" will be here soon enough.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.