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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. "
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.
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.
Bits are the things being transfered. Not Bytes.
A byte is a measurement that refers to the space needed to store 8 bits.
If I send someone 8 shoes, would you suggest that I refer to it as 8 feet (or 96 inches) of shoes?
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.
You are wrong actually. You failed to realize what the overall point of this was, and would rather attach your own mistrust of journalism(not necessarily a bad thing) to it.
From TFA; Currently the amount of traffic flowing between nations is approximately one terabit per second
So yes, P2P network are what make up a majority of this traffic. It is a gross misunderstanding of the facts to think that when you send a picture file to your granparents 2 sates away, or have your home page defaulted to MSN, or browsing to sites that are located mainly in your country of origin, that it somehow adds to the traffic Between countries.
Do you see the difference? Im trying real hard not to be confrontational here...
You don't think they took that into account? Slowing growth does not necessarily imply imminent zero or negative growth.