Slashdot Mirror
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 ...