Slashdot Mirror
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
my pr0n collection doubles every 100 days.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
It should be 'annoying X10 pop unders double every 100 days'
Are people being stupid, or simply letting themselves get caught up in the excitement?
I think we can safely file THAT particular statistic away with the MPAA's and RIAA's claim that piracy has cost billions and billions of dollars in lost revenue.
Of course, I could see the BSA, RIAA, and MPAA getting together and claiming that the piracy of billions of dollars of software is the CAUSE of traffic doubling every 100 days!
The problem with this article, as well as the original Worldcom estimate, is that they assume linear growth. In reality, the demand for Internet bandwidth grows and shrinks with the economy in general. We're in a slump right now, so growth has slowed down. In the next boom, more people will want to download rich content such as video, which will in turn increase the demand for bandwidth.
Like the stock market, the bandwidth market has its up times and its down times. When you invest in the stock market, you invest for the long-term trend which historically has been up. In the same way, the need for bandwidth will continue to grow over the long term as we continue to find new and cool things to do with it.
I find it really strange how otherwise serious and well-educated people very often go along with these "X doubles every Y days" stories. Everybody who is familiar with even basic math should know that this kind of growth can only last for for a very short time, otherwise we would all be impersonating Elvis by now.
Now Worldcom probably tweaked the facts but if some people really believe in this kind of exponential growth then I hardly have any compassion for them, and blaming Worldcom or someone else for your own stupidity is just silly.
When men used to be men
How much of that is due to companies adopting spam as an advertising medium?
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
-- Bartlett, as quoted in my 1st year physics textbook
How many other "marketing-oriented" "facts" are being touted today as justification for business, hiring, tactical, or hiring strategies? Or to be cruder, how many other business lies are out there mucking things up?
There's a re-evaluation of business tactics and laws going on. Maybe its time to re-evaluate supposed technological "truths" as well.
And maybe we techies can use this as yet another example of the hype over reality in technology, since WorldCom is in the use. Next time someone non-technical tosses out something obviously ridiculous, bring THIS up and ask them where they got their idea.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
internet pr0n/mp3 xfers double every 100 days, not traffic in general.
four-oh-four
According to this, there was about 1 gbps of internet traffic in 1995.
If this doubled every 100 days, there would be 50,000 terabits per second of internet traffic today. There's actually less than one terabit/sec of traffic.
By 2010, we could expect more bits per second of internet traffic than there are atoms in the universe.
A legparnasom tele van angolnaval.
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.
See my journal, I write things there
Bill Gate's nett worth
Microsoft's profits
Windows bugs
IIS security holes
The number of digits in the latest I.E. version number
The megabytage of Windows Media Player
The number of countries George Bush wants to bomb
The length of Richard Stallman's beard
The number of trolls on Slashdot
This issue (a dubious statistic repeated infinitely in press) results from the fact that facts are not checked thoroughly before publication. This sort of stuff happened with the stats the women's movement used, environmentalists, conservative groups, etc. The number of women dying from eating disorders was a classic error that was endlessly cycled and never questioned until the misconception was permanently rooted in the public consciousness.
Every interest group pushing an agenda (yes, even profit-seeking corporations seeking to sell more bandwith) seems to come up with some dubious statistic like this. The media gobble up press releases, disguised oftentimes as "studies" which are bought and paid for by the interest group, and they spit them out on in the newspapers and other media outlets, sometimes virtually unchanged.
I am not surprised by the Economist's story -- I am surprised that it took so long for it to make it into print. I wonder how many times the Economist itself published that same "fact" before discovering that the emporer had no clothes.
Lots of petrified grits
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.
This perversion of Moore's Law was a fault (in part by the telecom industry for believing the hype that the rest of the money grubbing industries where touting. Movies over the Net. Everyone telecommuting. Attend college classes from home. More retail content than you can choke on. Plus a bevy of other "wouldn't it be cool" party line hype that drove the bubble. Me? I blame it on the GUI and Mouse. If it wasn't for those things, the Net would still be a usefull place (tool, etc).
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear to be bright. Until you hear them speak.
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 isn't the first telecom to go bankrupt. This trend in this industry is just accelerating. Blame it on the classic business cycle: overbuilding, in this case excess capacity, traditionally overflowing inventories, usually are the downfall of boom times. This is especially true in the telecom industry. Sure, there's capacity, but instead of lowering prices to encourage consumption, the telecoms have to meet the bottom line. Unfortunately for some this is causing an industry shake-out.
Quintus malus puer est.
Same reason people believed eating carbohydrates would help them lose weight. They wanted to believe. They wanted to believe eating chocolate eclairs was good for them, and they wanted to believe that "nice man" wouldn't lie to them. And they wanted to believe the future was "so bright" they had "to wear shades." That's the one thing Clinton was able to impart to the country that Shrub doesn't seem to be able to. Optimism.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
Yeah. What was that Moore guy thinking in 1965
when he forecasted chip density doubling every
18 months. That obviously couldn't last more
than a couple of years, could it?
Some predictions seem to work better than others.
Nope, it doesn't double every 100 days, but the number of my posts to /. do.
Now if only the size of my Beowulf cluster would double every 100 days...
Hey, wait a sec... if the internet WERE doubling every 100 days, then wouldn't that mean that they would have to make double the servers every 100 days?....
Tibbon
tibbon.com
The next thing you know, they'll be telling us computers double in speed every 18 months!
er.
Rival telecoms companies believed the myth and cited UUNET's figures, even if their own traffic figures disagreed.
I find it disturbing that these rival telecom companies aren't making their own decisions. "Tech: Sir, we are only using 3% of our bandwidth and 45% of the nations traffic traverse our networks. CEO: Damnit, can't you hear? We need more bandwidth!! MOORRRREEE!!!!"
"I bet I'll get blamed for this." --Mayor Quimby
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!
there really isn't a way around that you know -- i hate the phrase "viscious cycle" but it's very necessary to use it here.
there are some basic facts we have to deal with when doing this
1) laying 1 fibre vs. laying 32 fibres costs about the same
2) you need to lay tons of fibres regardless (because the US is sparced out compared to, say, Tokyo / Seoul)
3) you need capacity *today*. not 32-fibre worth of capacity, maybe 1 or 2 fibre worth.
4) you probabbly need the 32-fibre worth of capacity in the future -- okay -- not the *near* future, but you know for a fact it will be utilized later
so basically, you need to invest in this infrastructure regardless -- because let's face it, you need them damn fibre runs even for today's economy. the choice boils down to
1) you spend 85 billion for 2 fibres today, and another 80 3 years later when you need to double the capacity
2) you spend 100 billion for 32 fibres today, and be home free for 12 years or so.
okay -- simplified math, bs statistics. but pretty much the same point.
if you were the CEO / CTO, what's gonna be your plan? i know i will bank on the 100 billion.
so they took a bet and ran out of $$ before it turned profitable. but it's was a lost gamble -- not a bad decision.
i like to point out that the interstate highway system is pretty much the same except the US got enough cash to cover it while it slowly became... profitable (on a entire economy scale)
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I think the Economist strectched the facts a bit here...
For one Odlyzko's article first appeared in 1998. People in the network community were refering to it back in 2000.
Also they are trying to pin the blame on Worldcom (kick them while they are down). If the AT&T executives failed to listen to their foremost expert why is that Worldcom's problem? The data Odlyzko quotes from MAE and other NAPs is publicly available. It was very easy for anybody to check and see if data was doubling or not...
As soon as the company files for ch. 11, we start blamming them for everything!
dmarien
Of course the statistic was bogus. 47.2% of all statistics are made up.
Maybe they were saying stuff like this to get government aid for laying fiber optic lines? Fiber can hold a buttload of bandwidth... Maybe they were too cheap (too busy with accounting bullcrap?) to lay lots of it on their own dime?
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
What's the world record for holding your breath?
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
If capacity has grown 500x in the last 5 years, and if demand has only quadrupled (4x), then webhosting should be dirt cheap, right???
After all, all of this overbuilding was for backbones and not the last mile, right?
So why are webhosting companies still charging $20 for 20 GB/month transfer rate, which is a little more monthly transfer rate than that of a 56K modem?
Does anybody have an real insight into the problem, and how I might go about exploiting it?
After all, How can we help the telecom industry if they can't give us discounts to access these overbuilt networks?
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
If \. is the MS equivalent of /. then I think humanity is a lost cause.
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
from Jakob Nielsen
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9509.html
(Thank you Samuel Clemens.) Well, fortunately, it seems as though a lot of people who use those doctored statistics often wind up hoist on their own petard. Looks like WorldCom's getting there, as was Child Find in an article in the Denver Post that won a Pulitzer Prize for reporters Griego and Kilzer.
There are some spectacularly bad examples in the posting above... I'm not sure anyone ever said there were a million homeless people. However, the widely-criticised (as to methodology) US census survey cited almost half a million, which you can add for yourself here. Also, as to the "statistics" quoted by the poster on sexual orientation, I know that as early as 1972 the University of Guelph's Veterinary and Agricultural Colleges were using the 10% figure in training films (one of which, my friend, a student in another department at the time, narrated) on animal breeding, and in Animal Days, the British naturalist Desmond Morris mentions something similar based on his work with ten-spined sticklebacks (1958). Similar figures seem to hold through all animal species.
The problem seems to be that too many of the general public fall for that same old Ad Verecundiam Fallacy. I think it's a lack of critical thinking skills.
And in this day and age, if a CEO doesn't qualify as an "improper authority"... --smirk--
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Interesting. This situation is going to be very good news for some people and very bad for others. The good news is for bandwidth customers, since whoever buys up Worldcom's assets won't have to repay their debt, and will be able to charge low prices for bandwidth. The bad news is that the investors who financed this infrastructure can say bye-bye to their money.
...when suits make decisions and don't believe what their own highly trained, highly experienced, and usually certified staff tell them. Believe me, I'm experiencing this first hand.
The RIAA and MPAA. Their clampdown is the reason for the diminishment of growth in network traffic.
As the article stated, in the very earliest days of internet adoption in the early 90's this was true.
If you ready geek literature and oldies but goldies such as the Jargon file, you'll find note of the the 'Fall that Never Ended' or the 'New Semester that never Ended'. Of course before about 1990, the only new internet users were new students at internet-connected universities. Thus, every fall saw a spurt of growth, and every summer saw a dramatic decline.
In 1993 and 1994, when the first versions of Netscape (and later, Internet Explorer) first came out and the web really became accessible to people who weren't geeks, it spawned that 100% every 100 days boom. That leveled off real quick. The internet is still developing... just not in the United States.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
The ISP's thought they could recover the losses on delivering bandwidth with the upcoming content buisiness. What they failed to see whas that no one would be buying content until the bandwidth was enough to support content like video and such at an acceptable quality. 512 kbit/s isnt near enough for semi quality video (no glitches and acceptable resolution). Bandwidth demand wont rise much until there is content that demands it and vice versa. If i do the things i do today i really dont need more bandwidth. I surf and d/l and chat. If i dont take pirating movies into the account there are few occasions where i really would benifit from having more bandwidth. A faster ping might help me when i run around fragging in fraggelonia but all the bandwidth in the world wont matter a bit. If movie companies start renting out movies on the net and does it broadly it would create a big demand for bandwidth but it has to happen at the same time and not one a while after the other. Worldcom and other ISP's have been waiting on the content companies and vice versa.
HTTP/1.1 400
What does this have to do with media, guaco? A child knows not to believe everything in the newspapers. This is misinformation from sources with legal and fiduciary responsibility to act forthrightly. This is financial analysts spouting press releases as research, accountants fudging figures, corporate execs talking up the sleeves of their $3,000 suits in their annual reports.
The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers. --Thomas Jefferson.
illegitimii non ingravare
At that rate (doubling every 100 days) it only takes 8.9 years to go from 1 to 6.32 billion. How many people are there on earth? Oh yeah, 6.32 billion.
Hmmm.... something smells fishy.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
"The {Fall,September,Semester} that Never ended" refers to AOL coming onto the Internet. Before, the newbie stuff lasted for maybe a month or so, after the start of the new school year. After that, it never ended.
<AOL>ME TOO!</AOL>
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Check the site again bud. If you notice, nearly half of the stories are not about sports. Given the massly disproportionate news coverage sports has over all other topics, I think we're doing a pretty good job, especially considering we haven't had many user submissions yet.
The site is intended to be for all college topics, even frats, as much as I hate them. Sports will be prevalent, of course, and you can remove sports stories with a simple preferences change.
~ now you know
I wonder how much this contributed to KPNQwest's death?
Watch out, companies will start suing WorldCom for unfair/uncompetetive business practices.
Of course, if WorldCom had meant to hurt others, they wouldn't have spent billions on a network that didn't need to exist yet.
--
No, no, no. This is Left Hand. Right Hand is wholly-owned subsidiary of our parent company. I'm afraid we don't maintain close ties. Good day.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
WorldCom would hook up new customers with connections capable of handling, say, up to 1.5 Mbit/s of data, knowing that for most of the time the lines would only carry a fraction of this amount. WorldCom would then use the 1.5 Mbit/s figures, not the actual traffic figures, when citing Internet traffic growth statistics.
So they were like a water company talking about how much water you COULD use if you left your faucets open and sprinklers on 24/7, rather than how much you actually ran. (And if everybody else did, too. And if the city left all the fire hydrants open...)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Don't believe everything you read on the internet... Err, umm, except slashdot articles.
LightReading had a very well-researched article about this earlier in the week.
And according to the article Worldcom was talking factor-of-10 per year, when in fact that was the right number for 1995 and 1996, but after that it was about factor-of-two per year. Still respectable, but nowhere NEAR Worldcom's numbers.
So with a factor-of-5 per year shortfall (and assuming bandwidth and customer base are proportional) when the bubble finally burst in early 2000 the dotcommers had one potential customer for each 125 they were expecting.
Having less than one percent of the market you thought you had can make the difference between a fantastic business plan and wastpaper.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Internet traffic doubles every 100 days? I never heard that myth. They must have a bad marketing department.
Shit, if you got rid of the FDA there would be 10,000 Phen-Fens on the market in a year. Having ONE get through every several years is not a blanket condemnation for getting rid of the system completely. It's great and all to be able to sue pharm companies after they kill thousands of people. But doing something, ANYTHING, to try to prevent those deaths up front is not a useless endevor.
That peice of meat WAS in good condition when it got to the store. Sure they can ruin it for you on premisis, but what condition would that meat be without any inspection at all (or worse "self inspection")?
This is a typical Libertarian posing. And for being the "geek" party they show an enormous lack of thought and practical reality with these sorts of "platforms".
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
The big change in internet traffic, I would guess, is multimedia. It is probably now dominated by people downloading music and such on fast connections with other applications becoming small time. People may very well viewing twice as much html every 100 days but bandwidth shall from now on be music and movies. It shall soon be mostly just movies. The speed they roll out the DSL lines should have a huge effect.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why is it that people buy into BS when it comes out of the president or some CEO?
It's the natural trust some people have for authority. In the US, most people seem to have a greater degree of distrust in the government (in Europe and the UK it seems the balance goes more the other way -- my English friends are regularly shocked that I not only fail to be surprised by, but often expect, the US government acting in a shady, unethical manner.)
Another example of this is when people getting violently screwed by their Very Big Company employer assume that everything happening to them is legal, because "every company does it that way". A big, big example of this is salaried employees not getting paid overtime -- the onus is on the employer to prove you're exempt, and if they don't or can't, they are required to pay overtime. Even many HR folk seem to honestly be unaware of this rule of the game, and millions of salaried grunts are the losers.
-- Old Man Kensey
They cap cable modems for good reasons. If you are speaking of a speed cap, it's so their pipe doesn't get hammered. Few people are going to give you a full OC-12 (which is probably what runs to your local node) to use as much as you want. The cable companies pay for bandwidth. It costs them money for ever mb that goes through the pipe to another network. If they have to expand so that every joe on the block can get a full 10mb (your cable modem has a 10mb connector on the back, so that's your 'max'), it would cost them a ton of money, perhaps in 1999 a company would have tried to take a loss and try something crazy like that, but not today.
Some Cable companies put limit caps (10gb or so) on users to allow them to all have good speeds, and make sure that no one is running Warez servers out of their house. They have abuse coordinators that get calls from Adobe, MSFT, etc. all the time, saying that they found software available to all on someone's system. Then the abuse coordinator, normally just asks them to stop for first time offenders ( I think, it's not my job). Most people don't use more than 15gb/month on normal access. I used to use alot more, then I was hosting LAN parties all the time, and was actually downloading mp3s. I personally can't stand the way that mp3s sound over my speakers (which are very, very good), so I only like to listen to CDs or SACDs if I can get them. With 11 computers hooked up, I probably only use about 4-7 gb/month of traffic. Yes, sometimes I have used much more, but never more than 15gb/month. If you use a proxy server such as Squid or others, then you can cache some pages, and speed up a few things, and use a little less bandwidth. If you are seriously using more than 20gb/month of bandwidth, i AM pretty impressed. I mean you could be running a mirror of something out of your house, which would be cool, but you really should get a larger pipe to try something like that. Our cable company offers 4mb/2mb lines just for things like that with static IPs. I have seen some that offer over a 40mb direct fibre line to your door.
Hey don't complain that they 'owe' you or something, let's just be thankful that we have broadband, I remember a few years ago the highest that most of us ever saw was an ISDN at work, and perhaps a T-1 at school (that was normally overworked).
Tibbon
tibbon.com
The original allocation process had a lot more in common with the .coms with the major banks front-running the issue and playing games with the supply of shares to kite prices up.
See my journal, I write things there
Radar, not instrumentation lighting. Not that I should really be wasting time answering an AC, but urban legends should be strangled at birth.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Moore's "law" is not such, it is an informed guesstimate.
Also bear in mind that when density begins from a very low number exponential increase can be sustained for longer.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The other two aren't.
So your point is?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.