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. "

Comments

Re:Is P2P traffic really THAT high?

[colonslashslash]

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.

Actually, in terms of quantity of traffic, BitTorrent is way in the lead with roughly 35% of all internet traffic, followed by eMule and Fastrack.

Source:Cache Logic

Re:How about instead of....

[AviLazar]

It's the point that saying, w/o any addendums, "Media files" implies what I originally said. I know pirating happens, I won't deny it, but many people use P2Ps for legit purposes.

I don't d/l my movies *EVAR* --- I pay for them through NetFlix :D Much better quality, and less work - for only 17/month thats a steal...I mean deal.

Oh I didn't D/L any Brittany Spears album...I bought them (runs, ducks, "NO I AM NOT GAY, SHE IS UBER HOT, EVEN WHEN PREGNANT")

Re:Might not be true...

[shotfeel]

That's especially important given that this data was all about bits travelling between countries, not within the country. From TFA:

Mr Mauldin was keen to point out that the measurements it was taking were not a snapshot of all net traffic. This was because Telegeography does not count the amount of data flowing over cables within national boundaries which, he said, was likely to be at least as large cross-border traffic.

What I see from my corner of the woods

[jmichaelg]

I live in a farm town in Central California that's served by Comcast. I work at home and access the web from about 5 am until 7 pm. When Comcast first installed fiber and offered Internet access, my downloads were running at around 4 mbits/sec which was considerably better than DSL's 1.5 mbit/sec. That was about 15 months ago. Recently, service has been oscillating. During the day, it's gotten up to 7 mbits/sec but at night, it has dropped to as low as 100 kbits/sec.

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.

Re:What's up with the bits?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, are you confused when buying a 100 gigabyte hard drive? Can't figure out how big your 512 megabyte flash card is? Let me correct your misconception: bytes are not "frequently" 6, 7, or 9 bits. In fact, in modern technology, bytes are invariably 8 bits and having bytes of any other size is incorrect. Past definitions of the byte have become irrelevant, unless you are specifically talking about one of the ancient systems that use outdated definitions of the word.

Re:Wow

[arbitraryaardvark]

My post may be redundant too, since I haven't read every other post yet.

But the article is wrong, because it confuses growth with rate of growth.

Year zero: 100 widgets per year.
Year one: 204 wpy - growth rate of 104%
Year two: 304 wpy - growth rate of 49%.
And that's in the first 8 months of year two!
In year two, the widgets grew by as much as the first 50 years of widgethood, before yeear zero.
So what the article is saying is the net is
growing by leaps and bounds like never before,
if terrabites between borders is a good way to measure it.
Another way to think about it is that fat pipes make it easy to move a lot of data, so there's more junk and low quality data that previously wouldn't have been bothered with - the amount of high quality data being moved is probably up too, but not easy to measure.
Summary: slashdot blurb is wrong due to basic math error.

Re:How about instead of....

[vertinox]

P2P is used for stealing stuff. Plain and simple.

Ok here we go again...

Stealing and theft by legal definition of the USA courts means you have denied other the use or value or therof property they legally own. Therefore theft is a crime that is tried in criminal courts...

Downloading movies and music is copyright violation which is a civil infraction. Therefore Copyright Infringment is tried in civil courts...

Do you know what the main and most important legal definition between these two matters are? You should know this because if anyone were ever to bring you to court...

In a criminal court, they have to prove you are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt... A civil court does not.

Think about what that means... It's very important that you know this, but many people in the US are not aware of this minor fact unless of course they had the speech from the local judge after they were made to go to Jury duty *coughs*