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Maturing Net Grows More Slowly
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC has an article covering the slowing growth rate of
Internet traffic." From the article: "Growth rates in some territories was staying high, said Mr. Mauldin, at 76% in Asia and 70% in Latin American but even these were down on 2004. Currently the amount of traffic flowing between nations is approximately one terabit per second. If growth rates hold up this is likely to hit three terabits per second by 2008. Much of the growth over the last few years has come about because of the rise in the popularity of file-sharing that encourages people to swap and share large media files, said Mr. Mauldin. "
Who would have thought....
It just goes to show how big something can get in a relatively short period of time.
I plan to do my part towards getting the three terabits a second by downloading some porn and music this afternoon.
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
swap and share large media files, said Mr Mauldin. "
She just says "swap and share large files"
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Something to do with the aging of the prostate.
Obviously the traffic is due to Numa Numa, the starwars kid and All Your Base. Doesn't he know anything?!
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
"Much of the growth over the last few years has come about because of the rise in the popularity of file-sharing that encourages people to swap and share large media files, said Mr Mauldin. "
Sounds like another "Well, it's on the news all the time so it must be sucking up a lot of bandwidth."
I don't really buy it. There's so many more millions of users that don't do large file download/uploads then do, and I think that the total bandwidth of all these people logging in, checking e-mail, browsing the web, etc is a lot more substantial then any "large large media files" shared amongst a select few.
I could be wrong of course, but last I checked HTTP was still the #1 protocol in use, and there's no data here to prove that p2p is sucking up more bandwidth then that.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
What about the large amount of traffic dedicated to porn?
Something wrong with using bytes? I know I can divide by 8, but still... thinking... eww...
In 2000 it was barely hitting 5 Gbit/s, the equivalent of a DVD film every 10 seconds.
What I want to know is how long would it take to fill a double decker bus with these DVDs.
Or more to the point, how long before the RIAA slap an injunction on you?
We're already seeing the end of Internet1, it's only a matter of time before we get to the bust part of the boom and bust cycle and hitch a ride onto Internet2. But with services such as broadband and P2P maxing out our bandwidth, what else do we need?
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
And transfers are no longer born. They are grown.
Gotta love statements like "If growth rates hold up this is likely to hit three terabits per second by 2008" In an article called "Maturing Net Grows More Slowly" about the falling rate of internet growth. I know we've got short attention spans, but how about some internal consistency? ::shrugs:: that or maybe they like meaningless projections.
There are lives at stake here!
Last I heard bittorrent alone accounted for 35-50% of all traffic.
Forgot my sources, though.
I'd be interested in how things like BitTorrent and ISPs using software to cache P2P traffic has helped in this regard. The amount of bandwidth that might have been otherwise used may have increased, but due to slimmer protocols and better distribution methods, the amount of traffic may have appeared to have grown at a slower rate.
They forgot to take in account the grow of the Spam.
I can believe that the number of new subscribers is down, but if I had twice as much bandwidth available I'd certainly use it (for bittorrent).
Is internet growth limited by the last mile? Meaning people can't get any more speed from their current cable/dsl connections?
Much of the growth over the last few years...
Which is true. The volume of Internet traffic for the usage you was referring (checking e-mail, browsing the web, etc) to haven't grown as much as file sharing has.
It means any further technological advances will have more impact on the perceived net speed.
I would venture to say it is being refined.
;)
The days of flashy graphics and gimicks are going away and the true nature of what the Internet was desgined for was for serving up information.
"It's content stupid"
Is it just me or does that title sound like a 2-yr old speaking. How about "Maturing Net's Growth Slows" or something that's actually english
Well, as machines get more powerful (mores law) and end-user bandwidth increases it becomes possible to do things that weren't possible before. Things like streaming HD video on demand with no interruptions or loss of quality, downloading a multi-cd linux distro in less than 60 seconds etc, VoIP etc.
This could lead to an increase in people doing things which weren't previously possible and larger file sizes as powerful machines can process more data.
The upshot of that will be slow and steady growth of internet traffic.
How can you assume it is because of file sharing? As more people moved to broadband, websites and uses for the internet started getting WAY more complex. Free streaming news video, Java games, VoIP, Flash, all the new PC games, etc... These are the things that are using the bandwidth. P2P has been around for years and people have been sharing movies for years.
Funny thing about this kind of growth .. at how little it started out as.
For example, back in 1994/95 when my ISP had either a T1 shared nationally with a university (delphi) or the local guy (tyrell) with a single sparc4 and a 56kb line and a pack of modems.
Funny thing was that at the time, your speed on the net was determined by a single T1. There was a default routed route between MCI and Sprintlink, a single T1, as long as you didn't have to traverse that link you were ok. Life was horrible if you had to across that link
Now of course, my modem has better connectivity than the local ISP and my home broadband has better transfer and latency than either place.
There are still some backwaters of the internet, a few years ago I found a university in Russia that was 9.6kb line out for their students (it was a short piece about the current uses of UUCP)
Oh course we need fat (and getting fatter) pipes nowaddays, hell, the patch downloads for any significant update to Windows is larger than the total distribution size of Windows 95.
Now if I could just get a FTTC here, than it'd be fast enough.
I didnt realise pr0n could be THAT fast!
-Rob
Someone instruct me as to how my above post is flamebait? I am replying, logically, to a person who replied to me.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Growth rates in some territories was staying high, said Mr Mauldin,
//guess the show.
He said this while laughing and slapping his knee. William b Williams then agreed with him.
A few minutes later, Bobby Bittman came on stage and said "HOW ARE YA!?!!?"
How long till we start measuring population density by data traffic?
At the moment Joe Public is using the internet for web browsing, email and IM. Thats it, because it takes people a long time to get into the mind set of a new technology. Features my Mum is asking for now is easy file transfer to herself and collegues. She works for local government and regulary produces files that are more popular than she initially realised. At the moment her only option is email. Thats fine, until she spends most of her morning emailing the same file to people who suddenly decide they need a copy too (if its not her its her secretary). What she needs is a public, secure file dump, its not that I can't set one up for her, its that people get scared by new acronyms. Just go to be secure ftp site and download it is almost always followed by: "Huh?". I suggested .Mac, but her net admins (quite rightly) won't let her download or install executables, so its too difficult for her to set up in XP.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
99.9999%
yeah. right. thanks for the information.
you must feel pretty authoritative.
anyway my real contention is with the slashdot post: P2P doesn't en-courage anybody to share files. it ALLOWS them to do it. en masse.
If you're trying not to be confrontational, you can try leaving out deliberately inflammatory wordings like "failed to realize", "gross misunderstanding of the facts", and "would rather attach your own mistrust of journalism". Starting with "You are wrong, actually" is a bit humorous, since you're tying into the poster's text, but the trick to being non-confrontational is to point out how the poster can be wrong without it being a personal failing on their part.
Repeating yourself with bold marks, and the rhetorical "Do you see the difference?", don't increase the cogence of your argument, and it makes it look like you think the one you're replying to is stupid. Maybe they're wrong, but you can be wrong without being stupid.
Besides that, if you're going to claim that p2p traffic is the majority of international traffic, you're going to have to back that up. Emails of pictures don't contribute to the HTTP statistics, so if HTTP is still the dominant protocol, your example doesn't match the argument.
But they did say sharing large files. A photo or sound bite isn't a large file, and e-mail attachments are just e-mails, which would have been recorded as such.
I agree that it doesn't necessarily mean p2p, but when they say people sharing large files it definitely indicates as much.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
At first I thought it was p2p traffic but that didn't make much sense since school is still out so the kids around here are home during the day. Turns out Comcast has offered a new service - you can download movies on demand via a Tivo like interface. Fast forward-pause-skip etc. My hunch is that when parents come home at night, they decide to watch a movie and it sucks up the available bandwidth. Since I use the net during the day, I'm not affected by the slowdown. However, if I came home at night and expected to relax with a good game of Counter Strike, I'd go back to DSL as night service on cable here truly sucks.
If the cable companies can iron out the logistics and offer consistently decent service to all users, legitimate movie downloading will take off and 1 Terabit/sec will end up looking like a 1 mhz 6502.
Copyright Infringement may be oft compared to 'theft' or 'stealing' but they are certainly different.
If you want to consider yourself a thief, go ahead. Personally, I delete 90% of the stuff I download. The stuff I keep I end up buying as DVDs when they come out and chucking the inferior downloaded copy.
So if you consider me to be a thief because I don't want to wait for my favorite TV show to come to DVD...AND I don't want to record it myself so instead rely on a friend who records it for me...
You should stop drinking the kool-ade!
Blar.
With how often I refresh slashdot, I probably account for 25% of the internet's traffic!
I run the domain ducker.org.uk for my family.
It's based in the US, because the hosting company (hostmatters.com) offered a good deal at the time.
So when I send an email from me (in Edinburgh) to my parents (near London) it goes via the US...
My Journal
I mean, sheesh. Relax, drink a beer.
Being non-confrontational requires actually *BEING* non-confrontational - you can't just say "I'm trying not be" and have it not be.
I was going to respond to you, but you're a real condescending prick so I'm not even going to bother.
Good day.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
As a happy Debian user, I think it's time we fess up. It's us, happily apt-getting our systems into software Nirvana. That explains the Internet traffic. Those filesharers are just part-time affairs, amateurs really.
Why just last night for example I apt-getted ("apt-got?") nearly a dozen software packages from a repository, not to mention all the libraries that were dependencies. On some nights I can do more.
I keep trying to tell myself I can quit, but man, it's not easy. I love having all that software at my fingertips; and now with broadband I can download as much of it as I like. I don't even have to need it. I can quit apt-getting any time I want to, I just don't want to at the moment. I've got it under control, seriously. I've quit apt-getting before. Several times.
Debian users, heed my call: you've got to start slowly and reduce your need to apt-get all that software. First try only apt-getting once a day, then once a week. Only apt-get update every six months, because hey, after all that time you deserve a reward. You just can't quit this stuff cold turkey.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
yes you can be wrong without being stupid. And you can be right without being smart. However, if you read an article and fail to understand(and it is a failure) the definition of a preposition, you are wrong, not stupid.
none of my statements were false. There was a gross misunderstanding of the facts, he was wrong, and he did attach his own mistrust of journalism to the story. Because I didnt hold his hand and be his mother does not mean Im being confrontational. As far as rhetorical, no it was a real question. perhaps I should have phrased it better; "Do you see the difference now that you realize you skipped over the word 'between'?"
And honestly, I have no need to back it up. I already know whats going on over trunk lines, and have no inclination to explain it to anyone who is too lazy to do their own research. I could care less if you believe me, it wont change whats going on in the world. Plus, I could aggregate any amount of links to prove any point I wanted, and so can you(you should know this by now). That is an excercise in futility
None of this changes the fact that sending email to your grandparents 2 states away does not add to traffic between countries.
OK, just in case you're not trolling for humour points, I'll bite. I meant Moores Law (as in Gordon Moore). Ok, so I didn't capitalise the "M" and I missed an "o", but come on! This is Slashdot!
Considering all the 'net is growing at 100% per week' crap that Worldcom was spewing, it is no wonder that things 'slowed down'. All that happened is that the numbers are finally catching up to reality.
Oh well, what the hell...
Uh...I'm confused. When did phrases like "failed to realize" and "misunderstanding the facts" becom inflamatory? Now, I suppose "Stupid, WOP, Dego, Dipshit, nincompoop, idiot" is not inflammatory then? Let's get some perspective on "inflammatory" OK?
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Anybody that's ever taken a basic intro to marketing course (and hopefully most everyone else as well) will see this article as common sense. Just take a look at that inverted parabolic curve that's called the "Product LIfe Cycle." The early adopters come along, then its more mainstream and usage increases sharply. Then the product matures and the slope flattens out, and then as the product dies, it's usage drops again. Sorry for the common sense of this all, but that's just how it goes. I'd say soon the Internet will only be growing with population growth, much like other utilities such as electric.
Finance tutorials and more! Understandfinance
quick, to the cloning tubes, boy wonder!
ignore the fact that only so many people exist upon this earth and let's crank out some more!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I recently graduated from a major research university and can remember a case from my freshman year. A student set up p2p file sharing on his computer without any limits on his uploads. His computer ended up being the 3rd highest bandwidth user that month. Only the physics simulation computers beat him out.
...confirmed this?
My Quadra 950 can beat up your honor student.
They're inflammatory in the sense that they are focused on the poster rather than on the facts. Perhaps the poster wasn't aware of the facts that you're about to present, or missed them, or perhaps even has an interpretation of them different from yours. The poster hasn't had a chance to respond to you yet, so simply present your case without commenting on the intelligence of the poster.
Non sequiturs containing strings of insults are also inflammatory. Just because my definition of "inflammatory" includes things that yours doesn't does not somehow imply that racist slurs aren't also inflammatory. BTW: it's usually spelled "dago", and "wop" is not an acronym.
As for "perspective", I should point out that I only commented on his style of discourse because he had specifically said he wasn't trying to be confrontational. The things I pointed out are far from the most offensive or inflammatory things said on Slashdot, but neither are they particularly helpful to his argument; they're a judgment on the poster rather than the facts. It would have been more polite to leave them out.
Currently the amount of traffic flowing between nations is approximately one terabit per second. ...
Much of the growth over the last few years has come about because of the rise in the popularity of file-sharing that encourages people to swap and share large media files, said Mr Mauldin.
It's me. In the last five years, I've discovered foreign cinema way beyond what's domestically available. Fortunately my fellow humans in France, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong, Korea and Russia are just fine with breaking their laws to share their countries movies with me. So, I'm doing about a terabit per second of foreign movie downloads nowadays.
With all of the hollywood remakes and imports recently (Ring, Dark Water, The Departed, Shall we Dance, Hero, House of Flying Daggers, etc, etc) it really is nice to be able to see the original movies when they are first released in their own countries. Not to mention the stuff that is so beyond American sensabilities that it will never make it to the big screen over here (Oldboy, Audition, Visitor Q, etc).
Sure, I end up watching some crap, but when its free that's not a problem, and when I do find something extraordinarily good, it then makes it worthwhile to go order a real high-quality DVD from one of those websites that is mostly non-English and still be assured that I am getting good value for my money. And sometimes the movies actually do make it here with a domestic DVD release, something that was exceptionally rare back in the days of vhs before the net was widespread.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'll give you that his choice of phrase was "impolite"; however, I must draw the line at characterizing his phrases as "inflammatory". I think doing so is a gross misuse of the word "inflammatory". The "string of insults" as counter-example are 100% inflammatory. Just trying to clarify how the word "inflammatory" should be used. Just another perspective. YMMV.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
I concur. I did consider retracting the use of the word when I responded to you. "Impolite" would have been a better word choice.
Now, I wouldn't go so far as to call it a GROSS misuse...
(that's a joke.)
to say that if things are kept as 'is' the internet will top off at 3Tb/s (international) in 2008 is crazy. Currently we share movies and music through file sharing. But those are only at current encoded sizes. Increase the bandwidth and somebody is going to think of something to fill it with. Entertainment will change, consumer consumption of media through the computer will change. Who's to say that the average consumer will not move on to file sharing as well. If as one poster said, that file sharing and p2p traffic was only a fraction what if the sharing process was simplified enough to bring in the mainstream user. In the US alone there is huge room for such growth. Verizon is currently offering their FIOS service only at rich neighborhoods around my area so when fiber hits with a minimum throughput of 15mb/s downstream I can only imagine at the amount of bits coarsing through the internet. This article was so ill conceived. Its like something I saw in Conneticut. A local McD's had a sundae for $1.06(US) buy another for $2.12(US)Currently the amount of traffic flowing between nations is approximately one terabit per second. If growth rates hold up this is likely to hit three terabits per second by 2008. its 2005 and 2008 is uhh...in 3 years so if the current rate is 1Tb/s then in 3 years... What kinda journalism is this?!
sig here
Oh, one other thing as a point of clarification....WOP most certainly IS an acronym. It stands for (W)ITH (O)UT (P)APERS. It was written on Italian immigrants coats with white chalk when the arrived at Ellis Island without proper documentation so that the INS (or whatever they were called back then) staff could easily keep track of them as they moved from one bureaucratic functionary to the next in search of the "Pot 'o Gold at the end of the Rainbow". It is how the term entered the lexicon and became an extremely derogatory and offensive term for an Italian immigrant. Ask someone of Italian decent in the U.S. to have their Grandparents (or maybe Great Grandparents) explain the term to you, how offensive it is, and the history behind it. I chose it just for that reason to demonstrate MY definition of inflammatory.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Internet2 already exists, of course.
http://www.internet2.edu/
Many web sites call that an urban legend.
Whatever the etymology, it's clearly offensive.
To clarify: I meant "it's clearly offensive and an excellent example of 'inflammatory'", not to imply that you were being offensive; I took your meaning.
Wow, very interesting. Thanks for the insightful and informative links.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Huh? Just setup an FTP server to drop her files into a directory that is accessible via HTTP and tell her the link to the file is always http://foo.bar/files/ + the file name. Then place a link to ftp://server.tld/ in her toolbar favourites in IE or whatever she uses and tell her to simply drop the file into the window.
She can then mail the link to the people who want the file.
(And, turn off accessing the directory listing to prevent snooping. Might be obvious to you and me, but I've seen stupid web server admins leave directory listings accessible a *lot*, and even some lawsuits because of it, so it might not be obvious to all.)
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?