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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.
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. -
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?
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!
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?
They forgot to take in account the grow of the Spam.
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
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!?!!?"
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!
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.
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.
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.