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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."
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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.
"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
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.
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?
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.
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.
from Jakob Nielsen
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9509.html
...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.