Myths about Internet growth

An anonymous reader writes "An article in The Economist outlines WorldCom's role in starting the myth that Internet traffic doubles every 100 days. This helped inflate the telecoms bubble."

Comments

Not to troll, but..

[f00zbll]

I remember president Ronald Reagan pulling the same kind of stuff when he was in office. Some of the statistics Reagan quoted in his public speeches often were wrong or had no data supporting the claim. Why is it that people buy into BS when it comes out of the president or some CEO?

Are people being stupid, or simply letting themselves get caught up in the excitement?

Re:Not to troll, but..

[Zoop]

Nobody without an axe to grind ever checks sources, and additionally, people are statistically innumerate.

For example, when you hear some group come out and say "1 in 3 women are sexually assaulted every year they're at college," you have to get into Clintonesque parsings of the meaning of "sexual assault", because it means that if assaults are truly random, almost all women will have been victimized by the time they get out of school. Advocates will say "yes, that's true" and invent a reason they think 90% of women don't report an assault.

It usually turns out that assault means "felt uncomfortable and/or threatened in an ecounter with the opposite sex." How many of us haven't felt uncomfortable? I'm surprised the statistic is a mere 1/3.

Then there are ones that advocates make up out of whole cloth or unrepresentative samples, like 10% of us are homosexuals (based on a self-reporting study of inmates defining homosexual as having had a sexual situation or thought dealing with the same sex--IN PRISON) or that there are a million homeless.

In each case, people fail to translate a statistic to its logical outcome or don't apply Occam's Razor to decide that it's more likely someone is inflating a statistic for personal gain (get funding for your issue/company) than it is that life is severely different than we think and we've been indulging in false consciousness all these years.

Re: Not to troll, but..

[pjrc]

Ok, I know it's off-topic, but...

... unrepresentative samples, like 10% of us are homosexuals (based on a self-reporting study of inmates defining homosexual as having had a sexual situation or thought dealing with the same sex--IN PRISON)

I've heard the 10% number over the years and believed it, so out of curiousity I did a little little google search, and whattaya know, the #1 result was this 10% myth page from the Family Research Institute.

Also featured today on the Family Research Institute home page:

• Homosexual rape is 5-10% of all rape and is increasing
• Story of Jim, homosexual sex offendor
• Link between pedophilia and homosexuality
• Children raised by homosexuals have "childhood difficulties"
• Special Study on Homosexuality (realaudio "lessons", I didn't bother listening to it)

You can also check out their " educational pamphlets", such as " Medical Consequences of What Homosexuals Do" ... utter homophobia (and a lot of hetrosexual couples have oral sex, anal sex, kinky S&M play, but the text is pure FUD, mostly Fear) I wonder if their pamphlets are made by the Chick Tract guys.

Later on the same google result is this paper which at first appears to be based on some honest research which claims 5% and goes on to say "On the basis of the Bagley et al.(1994) sample data, it is now known that the recent studies producing 1%(90) to 3% estimates for gay males, or for males who are homosexually active, are seriously flawed." Turns out this one is hosted by the Queer Resources Directory, but the author appears to be dedicated to helping troubled homosexual teens (more google searching)

So I guess I learned something new today. The gay population numbers are in a lot more dispute than WorldCom's traffic growth due to the tension between homosexual communities and homophobic right-wing groups, the 10% number I've always heard before does appear to be a bit high. Hmm. Personally, I'm het, but I'd much rather be around people who are homosexual than people who are homophobic. Fortunately, repressed homophobics are a lot easier to spot.

Very off-topic, someone please mod me down, if for nothing else other than wasting time on this instead of what I should be working on....

Capacity doubled - usage didn't

[hughk]

Nobody would put down a single fibre. It is too expensive to physically lay it. You lay two (or more) fibres instead but leave them unused (dark fibre). However, repeaters are there it is just they aren't attached wither end. Theoretically all you need is to connect a switch and you have your extra capacity.

This should have meant high bandwidth and low prices, but as suppliers like Worldcom had to borrow heavily for their infrastructure costs, they were stuck with high prices. Something similar happened with Deutsche Telekom in Germany. They built a fibre network through the former DDR but borrowed heavily to finance it. The things is that nobody was going to pay for that capacity at a premium price. Telekom didn't mess around with their predictions in the way that Worldcom did, but they also came unstuck.

The problem comes down to the revenue models and the telecom analysts in the banks. If I have a bank of 64K connections and I upgrade them to 1024K, I can't simply charge 16 times the price. A few customers can afford this (think banks), but many others can not.

Capacity including dark fibre definitely was doubling every 100 days but usage wasn't and certainly not revenue.

At the University where I work...

[RumGunner]

Usage tends to grow by leaps and bounds every time someone comes up with a new file sharing protocol.

Maybe that statement was from the good ol' days of Napster.

Price of Bandwidth

[_Sprocket_]

We've all heard talk of over-built data networks and "dark fiber". What interests me is how this apparent over-capacity does not seem to match up the price of bandwidth and the apparent bandwidth management of consumer-level heavy users.

Is there a mismatch? Do we actually have a demand that's being held in check by an inappropriate pricing schedule (perhapse even businesses with a lack of vision)? Or does potential capacity fail to overcome the cost of "lighting up" and maintaining these over-built networks?

Worldcom

[ajs]

Meanwhile, MCI/Worldcom/UUNET was dubbed "Whipping Boy of the Hour" by 17 leading pseudo-news organizations around the world.

Why is it that we pretend that such over-zealous predictions are unique?

Worldcom is in trouble so attacking them is easy: they have bigger fish to fry. If you go after Sprint this way, those bastards might sue you!