International Internet Infrastructure Triples 117
bda writes: "TeleGeography has just published this year's statistics for international Internet infrastructure growth, aka how much capacity goes where. Worldwide, Internet bandwidth nearly tripled (174 percent growth), but behind it are some pretty big differences -- growth ranged from 90 percent (less than doubling) for Africa to 479 percent (almost sextupling) for Latin America. City-wise, the top interregional hubs connecting between continents were New York, London, Amsterdam, Paris, SF, Tokyo, Washington DC, Miami, Los Angeles, Copenhagen, in that order. So the Internet is still fairly U.S.-centric ... but still becoming less so. Asia-Pac's ratio of out-of-region to in-region international capacity went from 7:1 to 4:1; Lat Am's from 36:1 to 7:1. The most obvious factor in long-haul Internet bandwidth growth seems to be whether or not someone has plunged ahead and laid dark fiber. When we looked at trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific capacity, Internet capacity stayed pretty constant at 10 percent of what was theoretically possible over lit fiber." You can read the executive summary (pdf), or you can (gulp) pay $1,995 for the whole thing. That would work out to about 50 copies of the Atlas of Cyberspace.
Broken Link (Score:2)
No, no, he's right! :) (Score:1)
timothy
Re:Broken Link (Score:2)
Iraq and internet infrastructure (Score:5, Interesting)
Nizar Hamdoun, Iraq's retiring UN ambassador, in a recent interview, said that when he returns to Iraq, he will try to open internet access to the country. He thinks the internet is very useful, and would like Iraqi kids to enjoy the benefits. Hamdoun designed the Iraqi UN mission's web site.
Iraq has international telephone access, which is also often monitored. The network was targeted and damaged during the Gulf War and the recent bombing. So service is sporadic.
Re:Iraq and internet infrastructure (Score:1)
I'm not saying it's false, or even wrong, I'm just saying I'd like to see some stuff that backs this up.
Re:Iraq and internet infrastructure (Score:1)
Re:Iraq and internet infrastructure (Score:1)
Re:Iraq and internet infrastructure (Score:1)
I hope this is a joke. Mel Brooks, d00d. You've never heard of him? I hope like hell you're kidding. If not... [geocities.com]
Re:Iraq and internet infrastructure (Score:1)
Re:Iraq and internet infrastructure (Score:1, Funny)
Saddam recently declared that the internet is a sinister tool used by governments for brainwashing people and spreading pornography.
Well, he's half right...
Re:Iraq and internet infrastructure (Score:1)
Need More Details... (Score:1)
I would like to see the comparative growth on the bandwith of 3rd world countries. I think it was static and most of the growth are enjoyed by more developed countries. Unfortunately the exec summary doesn't reveal all these stuffs so that the whole world may see how huge is the gap between them...
Re:Need More Details... (Score:1)
Luckily for 3rd world countries we have reached the point where usable computers are cheap and abundant. I would be willing to bet that most of the growth was not broadband though.
Re:Need More Details... (Score:1)
"In this village, none of the children have ever fragged someone. Please do your part to help out."
Re:Need More Details... (Score:1)
Treble the bandwidth treble the cost? (Score:4, Interesting)
I currently have a permament 28.8kbs connection charged at AU18c a Mb. With the advent of a PPPoE switched network in our city it was meant to herald a new age of connectivity with streaming movies and megabandwidth available. Shure it may be available but they are charging pretty similar rates per meg to my current modem connection. Meaning I could run up a AU$500 bill in a matter of minutes downloading the debian iso's for example.
Shouldn't the increse of available bandwidth decrease the cost to the consumers?
Re:Treble the bandwidth treble the cost? (Score:1)
In the Denmark you can get ADSL starting at around $40/month for a 384/128 (depends on the ISP).
And a lot of buildings have 10MBit for a very low price per. subscriber. (Wireless radio connections is starting to kick in.)
But then again who cares! I'm on the
(It's allways nice to be able to move the graph at kernel.org )
Two main thoughts (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Europe is growing rapidly, but not pulling Africa along with it.
2. Asia/Pacific is moving from a US-centric model to a Pacific model centered in Japan and Australia.
Both of these are fairly good things for the Net, and the first has positive implications for Privacy rights and where the Net will change, as the US fails to take the lead on things such as opt-in email requirements and consumer privacy, but the EU provides and enforces them. This will be the major battle of the zeros decade, as well as the transparency and ubiquity of the Net in most European countries and their direct colonies.
The breakdown of the US-centric Pacific/Asian model is probably good, as it was a bad fit before, but has negative implications for Privacy and also for Piracy. However, it may lead to increased growth of open source computing, as these regions deal with both growth and a downturn in economic fortunes. The need for servers and Net components will increase, but pressure to drop prices will most certainly kill MSFT control of this area, which will help force open source into most transparent background Net technology.
Cool!
Economy upturn? (Score:1)
Re:Economy upturn? (Score:1)
Re:Economy upturn? (Score:2, Informative)
Digging trenches and laying conduit is only part of the story. It is expensive to do, and costs enough that if you're digging in the first place it's not a whole lot more expensive to lay a hundred fibres as it is to lay one. It's cheaper to overprovision than it is to go back and dig up your trench in three years.
Laying the fibre is only part of the question. Getting the fibre into the ground costs (grasping at an arbitrary number) a quarter of the total cost to light it. All that fancy kit on either end and points in between costs lots of money and sucks a lot of power (not an issue in LA or NYC, but a major issue if you have to regenerate your signals somewhere in the middle of the Rocky Mountains).
Nortel and other systems providers will eventually start to make a decent income again selling equipment to light the dark fibre (or add wavelengths to partly lit fibre). It's Corning I'm worried about...
Re:Economy upturn? (Score:2)
Holy.... (Score:1)
Re:Holy.... (Score:1)
award (Score:1)
New inequity indicator (Score:2, Interesting)
An investment craze, a gold rush, call it whatever you want. What it means is that people have expanded infrastructure in a way that does not prove sustainable in the long run because it doesn't reach everybody.
Cars have penetrated nearly everywhere. Even cities whejre most people don't have cars gain benefits from cars and a car infrastructure. The same thing cannot be said for the Internet infrastructure.
Until the Bruce Sterling world exists and we have a self maintained system of multiple Nets and self-made, semi disposable computers for nearly everybody (including the poor and nomadic people in the world), then we won't have a useful Internet that will last beyond its gold rush period.
It has to become like the car. People said the car wouldn't penetrate certain levels of society either you know.
Re:New inequity indicator (Score:3, Interesting)
Okay, fair enough, but a couple of paragraphs later
"It has to become like the car. People said the car wouldn't penetrate certain levels of society either you know."
Yes, exactly. These things always take time, and it's always the rich who get it first. Well, okay, the very first are the inventors (who are usually, themselves, reasonably well-off) but then, in order, it's:
1) The rich in rich countries
2) The rich in poor countries and the middle class in rich countries
3) The poor in rich countries and the (usually small) middle class in poor countries
4) Absolutely everybody
Note that the automobile is still going through this process -- I'd put it at about stage 3.5 -- but nobody denies the ubiquity of the automobile, or doubts that it will get even more ubiquitous in the future. Air travel is at about 2.7. Antibiotics, 3.9. Radio, 4. TV, just about exactly on 3. Etc. I'm sure I could come up with some other examples, but you get the idea. This is a technological growth pattern that is neither new nor unique to any one technology.
Internet connectivity I'd say is at about 2.5, which may not be all that great -- but considering that the idea of mass connection to the Net is only about two decades old by the most generous possible measure (counting Compuserve et seq as part of "the Net" -- if you only count the Internet as such, I'd say less than a decade, since 99% of the population had never heard of it before the advent of the WWW) it's not doing that badly. Unless things really go to hell for some reason, I predict stage 3 within the next few years and stage 4 no later than 2020.
So don't write off the Net. The "Bruce Sterling world" will be here soon enough.
Re:New inequity indicator (Score:2)
And with the penetration of media technologies like television and the internet comes the concommitent loss of cultural variety, too. I don't think cultural diversity for its own sake is always a unmitigatedly good thing (cultural practices that, for example, abuse women are ones that I wouldn't miss after they're deprecated, and I wouldn't want to sentence anyone to malaria in the name of cultural diversity) but some technologies deteriorate cultures without equivalent benefit or generating compensating cultural institutions (TV topping the list, IMO.)
Re:New inequity indicator (Score:1)
Yeah, while cars may not have filtered down to the poorest, everybody feels the benefit of increased pollution, and danger of walking across the road. It is difficult to establish a price on how much people who dont have cars have benefited by this, but that wont stop Economic Rationalist scum like yourself from justifiying this madness.
Bandwidth vs. Usage (Score:2, Insightful)
What would be great is if we could see the comparative stats on increased bandwidth vs. the usage of clients.
Increased bandwidth doesn't necessarily mean an expansion of access to everyone in the world.
Poorly done charts (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Poorly done charts (Score:1)
Re:Poorly done charts (Score:2)
It also had the actual speed numbers next to it... a little calc and you have 1/2386 difference in Bandwidth between Europe/Latin America and Europe/US...
Why do you find that so surprising? Why lay a much longer fiber cable to Latin America, when you can just lay one to US, and interconnect with Latin America through the US?
Also, doubtful there is as much demand for the Latin America/Europe link than there is for the US/Europe link.
European Interchange (Score:4, Informative)
can't read small print but curious... (Score:1)
I'm really curious to read what they have in the sample page which features Israel and Ireland. Both have developed hi-tech hubs (Israel probably more so). I think I read that israeli companies form the largest contingency on Nasdaq after the north american companies, and they're mostly hi-tech. That should translate to some real bandwidth.
Misleading (Score:1)
no, sextupling is correct (Score:2, Informative)
new x = (old x) * (1.y)
In other words, you count the 100% that x originally was, so sextupling (~579%) is correct.
Jaime
Er, that should be... (Score:1)
I wrote the previous when I was too tired last night.
Jaime
Not sure how to put this (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, I am glad that international connections, servers, and users are growing by leaps and bounds. The more connections in the world, that is more info that can be spread, more tolerance that can be learned, more history and purpose that can be learned. Cultures (sp?) intersect and learn from each other. The human race grows at a pace not ever, ever seen before!!
I just get very frustrated by people that say "Antartica only has a 4Kb connection to the Internet! Unfair!!! We deserve an OC-48 RIGHT NOW!"
I hope you see what I mean.
Re:Not sure how to put this (Score:1)
Okay, now sit your pansy lamerican arse back on your seat for a moment.
Who pays for the link from Australia to the United States? Give you a clue - Australians. Whatever infrastructure corporate USA has sunk into your soil is irrelevant. We pay for all the traffic to and from Australia. When some lamerican skript kiddy ping floods an Australian server, that's Australian dollars footing the bill.
Having an anywhere-centric Internet is bad, since that means there are fewer Governments that need to be corrupted to spoil the Internet. Having a USA centric Internet is especially bad, since the USA doesn't respect the rights of foreign persons or corporations. Let's see - the USA brought us Echelon and Spam. The good old US of A, mate - they take with one hand, and serve crap with the other.
Re:Not sure how to put this (Score:2)
Fail- try again.
Re:Not sure how to put this (Score:1)
And the web was invented by an Englishman at the CERN institute in Switzerland. I think your point is a bit weak.
Re:Not sure how to put this (Score:1)
Re:Not sure how to put this (Score:2)
Re:Not sure how to put this (Score:1)
Re:Not sure how to put this (Score:2, Insightful)
Out of the top 5 interregional hubs 4 are based in West-Europe. So the internet is still fairly Europe-centric...
Re:Not sure how to put this (Score:1)
Re:Not sure how to put this (Score:2)
#1 is NY
2 of 5 is US
3 of 7 is US
4 of 8 is US
5 of 9 is US
5 of 10 is US
or 5 US, 4 Europe, 1 Asia- nope, you fail (unless Tokyo somehow became European recently- nice try on the stats, though)
And these are international hubs. Howabout intra-continental traffic?
Re:Not sure how to put this (Score:1)
Statistics...
Re:Not sure how to put this (Score:1)
For any country to complain about not having "equal access" to the Internet should basically shut up until they put in the money that the US put in initially. (Disregard the billions put into the infrastructure since then)
Okay, just let me get this straight. You want us all to pour massive amounts of money into the Internet before we can have "equal access", but we have to "disregard" the billions put into the infrastructure already? What, does that not count or something? Will it count from now? I hope someone is keeping tabs, we wouldn't want the US to be out-invested or anything now would we.
xx Stuii!
Re:Not sure how to put this (Score:2)
Sorry I was unclear on that point, my fault.
Re:yeah (Score:2)
Connectivity to *What*? (Score:3, Insightful)
Bandwidth is like megahertz, it's an arbitrary number that may or may not be useful.
The broad-band providers maximized their customer experience by caching at their head-ends. The "massive bandwidth" of broadband was therefore useful, without the lag times that must be considered.
Even in a perfect network, the latency for data travel matters. How often are the LED's on your 56K modem pegged on by a datastream where your link is the limiting factor?
A 747 full of DAT's has truly awsome bandwidth, but the latency is deadly.
The beauty of this massive engorgement in fibers is that once layed, a fiber optic cable's capacity is limited only by the hardware at the end points. Any improvement in technology, such as WDM, multiplies the available bits-per-second without having to lay more fiber.
As places like NewYork and London and Tokyo reach a fiber glut, the rest of the world will follow. Just like telephones and electric power, "poor" places will simply get their access at a slower pace. But there are always alternatives, such as satellite, to get the information. It might not be in flashy graphics, or up-to-the-second, but "poor" areas have no demand for that to cover the costs anyway. That's why they're called "poor".
If you think that an area is under-served, then stand up and join or organize a group to lay the freaking fiber. Complaining all day won't put cables in the water/ground.
But when you do, think also of what it is you're connecting *to*, or you may end up connected to nothing anyone wants.
Bob-
Re:Connectivity to *What*? (Score:1)
A 747 freighter [boeing.com] has a cargo capacity of 777.9 cubic metres, or 109,800kg (ie: whichever you hit first). By volume, it could carry 8 million DDS3 tapes [gy.com], equivalent to approximately 96 Terabytes per load. However, it can only carry approximately 481,000 DDS3 tapes by weight (box of 5 weighs 228g), which is only equivalent to 5.7 Terabytes per load.
Assuming you can load the data on and read the data off those tapes instantaneously, and assuming you had a perfect 14 hour flight from Sydney (Australia) [getty.edu] to Los Angeles (United States) [getty.edu], your maximum bandwidth is close to 916 bits per second.
Not that awesome at all, really.
Oops. (Score:1)
D'oh! Don't you hate it when you put the decimal point a few too many places to the left?
5.7 Petabytes per load.
916 Megabits per second average throughput.
So maybe it is that awesome after all :)
You could take a week to write the tapes and load them, and another week to unload and read them, and you'd still have damned good throughput for an international link. I'm impressed.
Just goes to show - the calculator got the number right, but it's the nut behind the wheel who has got to get the units right.
Re:Connectivity to *What*? (Score:2)
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but 481,500 tapes * 20GB per tape(*) = 9,630,000GB = 9404TB = 9.4PB.
How did you get 5.7TB ?
If you could somehow carry the full 8 million tapes, the total data capacity would be 149 Zettabytes.
And the bandwith calculation is suspect too. Even if your capacity estimate is correct, moving 5.7TB in 14 hours requires a bandwidth of 945Mbps. Moving 9.4PB in 14 hours requires a bandwidth of over 1.5Tbps.
*Assuming DDS-4 uncompressed, not DDS-3
Re:Connectivity to *What*? (Score:1)
Why are you correcting me based on DDS4, when I specified DDS3?
And as I posted about half an hour ago - oops, I a 10^3 error. Then oops, I did it again!
Re:Connectivity to *What*? (Score:2)
Sorry. I figured that we were trying to find the maximum bandwidth of a 777. Since a DDS-4 tape is the same size and weight as a DDS-3 tape it seemed like a logical way to maximize the bandwidth with a minimum of further research.
And, you posted your correction after I started writing mine. I didn't see it until after I hit submit.
How can you believe it? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:How can you believe it? (Score:1)
Our numbers deal with deployed Internet capacity -- router-to-router IP links that carry public Internet traffic. Internet capacity is carved out of raw bandwidth, the stuff they light submarine cables with. The Southern Cross Cable Network is scheduled to hit 240 Gbps of raw capacity as of early 2002, and Southern Cross connected to New Zealand (but not only New Zealand). So I'm going to assume you're talking about Southern Cross.
The point: raw bandwidth is not Internet bandwidth; Internet bandwidth is always a subset of raw bandwidth. As noted, the total trans-oceanic capacities we saw suggested that there is usually a 10:1 relationship, but more research is required to come up with a definitive answer.
US Centric? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:US Centric? (Score:1, Insightful)
Americans always have an attitude towards the internet that it's the *USAnet*, and that if you're not from America, then you're a forreigner using their USAnet. Slashdot's US-centric bias is just one example of that.
Re:US Centric? (Score:1)
Statistics and "triple growth" (Score:2, Interesting)
If you had 100 "units" of bandwidth, and you then had 174 percent of them the next year, you'd have 174 "units" of bandwidth. Which is not triple.
If you had 100 "uints" of bandwidth and you the ADDED 174 percent of that capacity (I guess they mean in this case that "growth == new", which is not clear), you would have 274 "units",which is not near triple either... it's closer to two and a half times... but I'm sure the folks who are exited enough to write about it want it to be triple.
You can also do the "shampoo" statistics. Take a 12 oz. bottle of shampoo. Make it into an 18oz bottle. It's now "50% bigger"... unless you do the math from the other side, in which case it's only 33% bigger.
I fergit who said it, but they were right: "There are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics."
Duh (Score:2)