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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. "
"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. -
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?
It means any further technological advances will have more impact on the perceived net speed.
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 would suggest you refer to it as 4 pairs of shoes....
Or is a pair the space needed to store 2 shoes?
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!
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.