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The Internet

Internet Traffic Still Growing Quickly 164

Posted by michael from the mostly-files-sent-in-order-to-have-your-advice dept.
linuxscrub writes "I guess the previous articles about internet traffic doubling/[time period] being wrong were wrong? A new IDC report states that internet traffic will nearly double annually until 2007. They even use /.'s favorite unit of capacity/storage, the LOC. They predict that internet traffic will be 64,000 LOC/day! Wow, 64000 LOC, that sure sounds impressive!!"
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Internet Traffic Still Growing Quickly More

Internet Traffic Still Growing Quickly

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  • and research shows (Score:5, Funny)

    by vosbert ( 544192 ) on Saturday March 01, 2003 @08:50AM (#5412714)
    it's all due to pr0n and gaming....

  • Tell a non techie (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Isbiten ( 597220 ) <isbiten@gmail. c o m> on Saturday March 01, 2003 @08:50AM (#5412715) Homepage
    How much is 1 loc in gigabytes?

    And in the article they talk about petabits. Im confused :)

  • Nicely written! (Score:5, Informative)

    by tunah ( 530328 ) <sam AT krayup DOT com> on Saturday March 01, 2003 @08:50AM (#5412719) Homepage
    LOC==Library of Congress.

    If you're gonna use an obscure acronym three times, write it in full the first time.

    • Re:Nicely written! (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      If you're gonna use an obscure acronym

      Also one that's commonly used to mean something else in computer circles (or perhaps I've been spending too long with the suits).
    • the size of the LOC is doubling every century or something.

    • Re:Nicely written! (Score:4, Funny)

      by chrisseaton ( 573490 ) on Saturday March 01, 2003 @09:16AM (#5412780) Homepage
      How about Bodleians for a change?

    • Pointless unit (Score:3, Insightful)

      by brejc8 ( 223089 )
      Yet another pointless unit to make people go woo. Along with the width of a hair.
      They might as well talk about the total mass of all electrons and photons (you never know) ammounting to the waight of 29 elehpants with the number growing to 30 elephants and two donkeys. Have these people hear of SI units?
      • True. It's just like people who try to make relative sizes/volumes of things more understandable by using real life objects. Things like: "think of Sun as an orange... now Earth is a pea, and it's so far from the orange that you can't see it 'cause there's that building over there that blocks line of sight; but if you could see it it'd be somewhere beyond north-Dakota". Or, "if all Oreos sold in one day were stacked in one place, they'd be as big as USS Enterprise and one half of a destroyer, plus 5 lifeboats". Oh, I see, now it all suddenly makes perfect sense; I really understand exact relationship between huge things.

        I mean; whenever the order of magnitude difference between things exceeds a threshold (whatever it may be for the person in question; anything from 2 to 6), there is just no way to really put things in perspective, by using silly analogies. And LOC seems like just another such analogy (perhaps even worse than the older "page of text" used instead of kilobyte... assuming 8-bit chars).

    • Or use <acronym title="Library of Congress">LOC</acronym>

    • Re:Nicely written! (Score:3, Funny)

      by tsa ( 15680 )
      No no no... this forces people to RTFA.
    • So it's the amount of bytes that's in the LOC, then? This LOC unit is obviously not a constant then, I guess...
    • ...is that hard drives consistently hold more and more information, and whenever someone predicts this is the end of the road some major breakthrough launches another cycle good for 10-years or so. All in a similar form factor over time, and even getting smaller eventually.

      At the same time the price of hard drives and RAM keep falling to record low. Nowadays it is routine to have 1GB of RAM and 100's GB for hard drives, soon we will be counting in TB.

      Really it was no wonder that IDC predicted traffic will continue to increase. How could it be otherwise !!! In this view, perhaps the LOC will become the basic term for bandwidth/storage in the long run ?

    • Thanks - I thought it was "lines of code" and wondering who was running
      • wget -r http://*|wc -l

      • "Thanks - I thought it was "lines of code" and wondering who was running
        wget -r http://*|wc -l"
        It's me. But, uh, it's not done yet. I'll let you know the results when it is.
    • LOC==Lines of Code.

      Somewhere all the internet traffic is being turned into shareware?

      Like it makes more sense that this would be put in the Library of Congress. What's the Dewey Decimal for 'Flamebait'?

    • I wasn't thinking Libraries of Congress. "Lines of code? Well, I guess you could measure text throughput that way. But why?"
    • I think it will always be that way here. Tossing out obscure terms and abbreviations without explanation is a way of showing your uber-geekness.

  • they use LOC... (Score:5, Funny)

    by lfourrier ( 209630 ) on Saturday March 01, 2003 @08:51AM (#5412721)
    but if the Library Of Congress continue initiatives to archive the net, even if all traffic is not new content, the unit is not constant.

  • Wow, 64000 LOCs... (Score:5, Funny)

    by tunah ( 530328 ) <sam AT krayup DOT com> on Saturday March 01, 2003 @08:53AM (#5412723) Homepage
    But what we REALLY need to know is how many helloworld.c's is that?

    Every tradition has to start somewhere, right?

  • I know why... (Score:5, Funny)

    by CommandNotFound ( 571326 ) on Saturday March 01, 2003 @08:54AM (#5412728)
    ... according to my apache access logs, over half of that traffic is going to be script kiddies trying to run

    GET /scripts/../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+dir HTTP/1.0

    over and over and over... guys, there is no command.com on my system. Give it a rest!

  • http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jhtml?containerId=pr2003 (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 01, 2003 @08:54AM (#5412731)
    Wee more karma to the ACs!

    IDC Finds that Broadband Adoption Will Drive Internet Traffic Growth

    27 Feb 2003

    FRAMINGHAM, Mass., February 27, 2003 - IDC predicts that the volume of Internet traffic generated by end users worldwide will nearly double annually over the next five years, increasing from 180 petabits per day in 2002 to 5,175 petabits per day by the end of 2007. To put these figures into perspective, the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress amounts to only 10 terabytes of information. By 2007, IDC expects Internet users will access, download, and share the information equivalent of the entire Library of Congress more than 64,000 times over, every day.

    "Some industry observers have speculated that slowing growth in Internet traffic is at the root of the current telecom malaise, but IDC research shows that not only is Internet traffic growth strong, but it will continue at near triple digit rates over the next five years," said Sterling Perrin, senior research analyst, Optical Networks at IDC.

    This has some interesting implications for telecommunications equipment suppliers, particularly in the optical market. "As long as the total amount of voice and data traffic on the network continues to increase, then the need will arise for carriers to buy equipment, such as next-generation optical, that transports and manages it cheaper and more efficiently than the earlier generation of pure SONET-based products," said Perrin.

    The IDC study finds that, although growth in the number of Internet users will continue to be an important traffic driver, the migration of those Internet users to bigger access pipes will be even more significant. In particular, broadband adoption by consumers around the world will make this the fastest growing and largest segment in terms of Internet traffic volume generated. By 2007, IDC believes that consumers will account for 60% of all Internet traffic generated, versus roughly 40% for business users. Mobile Internet users are expected to have only a minimal impact on overall traffic volume during the forecast period.

    IDC's recently released study, Worldwide Bandwidth End-User Forecast and Analysis, 2003-2007: More is Still Not Enough (IDC #28875) provides a five-year forecast of global Internet traffic growth over the next five years, broken down by business, consumer, and mobile user segments. The study, which quantifies how much Internet traffic will be generated by end-users, draws on a wealth of IDC survey data including IDC's Internet Commerce Market Model, version 8.3, as well as IDC's forecasts for broadband and mobile access

    To purchase this document, call IDC's sales hotline at 508-988-7988 or email sales@idc.com.

  • Elections and cable (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tyreth ( 523822 ) on Saturday March 01, 2003 @08:56AM (#5412736)
    Soon people in my area have the council elections (compulsory here in Australia). I have to choose to give my preferential vote to 10 candidates of whom I know nothing about except 1/3 of an A4 sheet of paper description that they have written themselves.

    None of them are inspiring. I was thinking maybe I could run for election next time with just one promise, "I will work to lay the backbone for a fiber optics network to eventually reach into every house in our electorate!". Then we'll see the amount of data sent over the internet more than doubled each time :)

  • Anyone who says this growth is logarithmic is wrong. It's exponential. Cue a horde of morons saying otherwise.

    -Mark
    • Anyone who says this growth is exponential is wrong. An article completely void of any substance can only be called drivel. Cue a horde of morons saying otherwise.

      Johan Veenstra
      • Anyone who says this growth is exponential is wrong. An article completely void of any substance can only be called drivel.

        Thanks for informing us of this vital information Johan, we really appreciate it.

        Cue a horde of morons saying otherwise.

        No! Don't cue them... too late. What did you have to go and do that for Johan?

  • HOW ON EARTH?? (Score:4, Funny)

    by spoonist ( 32012 ) on Saturday March 01, 2003 @08:58AM (#5412741) Journal

    Okay. So let me get a couple of things straight. LOC = Library of Congress, right? And they're moving 64,000 of these around PER DAY?

    THAT'S ASTOUNDING!!! Have you ever been to their main building, the Thomas Jefferson Building [loc.gov]? It's freakin' HUGE!

    Where'd they find 64,000 of these buildings and just how exactly are they moving them around??

    Maybe I should've posted this as a question to Ask Slashdot [slashdot.org].

    • Re:HOW ON EARTH?? (Score:5, Funny)

      by TopShelf ( 92521 ) on Saturday March 01, 2003 @09:20AM (#5412789) Homepage Journal
      In the past, they'd have to break down the building into very very tiny pieces in order to fit over the phone lines, where it would travel "bit by bit" (that's a computer term) and be reassembled someplace else, like a travelling road show. But now, with the onset of Broadband Internet, the pieces that can be sent through the net are much bigger, so it takes less time to break the building down and reassemble it on the other side. The magical world of technology has made this and many other wondrous things possible! Support your local scientists!
      • But now, with the onset of Broadband Internet, the pieces that can be sent through the net are much bigger.

        That's correct. You may hear people talk about bandwidth in terms of OC units, as in, "We just got another OC3 pulled into our cabinet."

        That stands for "office cubicle", and it's a standardized unit of bandwidth measurement. The reference OC is a volume 6' x 8' x 8', with a certain distribution of solid matter (excluding the worker, of course). An OC3 allows you to transfer 3 standard cubicles per hour. Actual transfer speeds depend on density, of course. The building core will take more time, and things like corridors and auditoriums take a lot less.
      • huh? Packet sizes are increasing?

        And here I thought PPPoE and the like were causing packet sizes to down.... :)
    • They're using demons imprisoned in fireplaces as a source of power.

      [This is a book reference]
    • Buildings float, as anyone who saw that Monty Python movie can confirm. Due to the greenhouse effect there will be more water around in the future. This allows for more floating buildings. Easy!
    • Dude, thats easy. The building already has repulsers, all you have to do is surround Nessus's flycycle with plastic and then slowly move the building. You might have to cut away some of it to travel faster, but itll work! Nothing that works is insane.

  • I think I know what the new driver will be. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by blair1q ( 305137 ) on Saturday March 01, 2003 @09:00AM (#5412747) Journal
    I've been hitting the Internet Radio pretty heavily recently. 128 kbps streams whenever I can get them. Not many are free, still, but there's enough to keep me happy.

    Which makes me wondere if the Next Big Thing won't be Internet TV.

    Not crummy little windows, mad pixelation, and choppy frame rates, but real, HD-quality, big-window content-on-demand, bypassing the satellite and cable companies entirely.

    Good-bye "channels". Hello IPv6 URI's.
    • Oh yeah, sure! I will then watch Internet TV over my _cable_ connection!
    • Unless they get agreements with lots of ISPs to multicast content, I don't think this is going to happen, due to the massive amount of bandwidth and the unpredictibility of internet traffic (see The Slashdot Effect, only instead of a 100KB page, it's a 100MB show). And even then the sheer number of channels that would be available (if this caught on, it'd be like streaming audio in it's heyday--almost an uncountable number of stations) would make even this an all but insurmountable task. The ISPs would only be able to multicast a limited number of stations, and - guess who gets shut out of that equation? You and me.
      Maybe your IPv6 URIs takes care of that, I have no idea what that is, but it sounds like a difficult situation at best.
    • I've actually thought of this before, too. I thought it had a really cool potential: You're not confined to the ~60 channels my cable company thinks I might want. I want the local news for a small town on the opposite side of the country? No problem, just enter in the right 'hostname.'

      Not only that, but it can make 'start up' easier, and even make censorship harder. You want to start a TV station out of your garage? All you need is a server and enough bandwidth to handle the viewers. You don't need an FCC license, a 1000' tower, a megawatt transmitter...

      The problem is that this will REALLY suck for people like CNN, who suddenly need some insane amount of bandwidth, maybe like a megabit a person (if it's high-res, with sound)... I suppose this is where IPv6's support for multicast will become really helpful?

      The other really cool thing is that you can see exactly who's viewing your station, when, etc. With TV, short of the viewer ratings (polls done via telephone), you have no idea who's watching. With this, I can say "Exactly 1,348 people watched my show," and even do what people do with websites and try to extract more information: "most of them seem to be in California." (Heh, maybe we could even have referrers: "I got a deluge of people watching my show today, after SlashdotTV mentioned my site.")

      Plus, it's easy to pass along alternate languages (prefer the news in Spanish? Just set that in your TV's preferences), 'closed captioning,' etc -- maybe even something like Slashdot's "Related Links." ("In today's news, Microsoft Corporation has filed for bankruptcy..." would allow you to go to Microsoft's site if they made it a 'link'.)

      I can't predict the future, but I sure hope that this is the next "big thing." (And that no idiots at the MPAA/RIAA/etc. try to apply DRM all over it.)
      • It's funny I built all of this 3 years ago at a failed startup. Wonder why it failed the big networks couldent get there content away from the affiliates due to some binding arbitration thatsaid affiates had rights to the conent over the internet as well for there contract area. You know how hard it is to deal with finding out exactly where somebody is at the time they view content on the internet without some unhackable hardware shim with GPS? Servers have gotten cheaper and encoding racks have gotten cheaper (it used to take 12 Dual PIII 800's to encode 2 formats in 3 differnt VBR streams redundantly at about 10 grand a pop) Multicast is nice but the major carriers dont want to make it work between them and it cant be assumed to work untill IPv6 (it's required to under IPv6) It's the question of getting content people want to watch (that million viewer network needed 100,000 people watching 4 hours a day to break even)

        Codecs have gotten better and bandwith has increased. 500 kbit a sec streams look pretty good if encoded properly (read 2 pass) as in VHS but different artifacts. 1 Megabit which most DSL boxes could deal with would be nice but in reality the best way to get multicast working in the near run for this is DSL to the TV delivered to there POPS via a sat multicast this could be a great serive add on for a telco.
  • So how much is one official LOC? :)

    • So how much is one official LOC? :)

      You want that in interior decorator measure? Broken down into shelf-yards of leatherbound, shelf-yards of bluecloth, shelf-yards of reds?

  • that given 64000 LOC a day the world's major Internet routes are still peered on 1200 baud modems or Joe Hacker hasn't made his quota for many moons. Where do we go from here?

    In all seriousness, they can't mean Lines Of Code, surely?

  • $4,5000 to read the article! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Andy_R ( 114137 ) on Saturday March 01, 2003 @09:07AM (#5412764) Homepage Journal
    The link is just to a press release for "Worldwide Bandwidth End-Use Forecast and Analysis, 2003-2007: More Is Still Not Enough"

    The document itself can be yours for the tiny sum of $4,500, surely an absolute bargain considering is contains an amazing FIFTEEN pages!
    • It's because it costs a _lot_ to make those data, and only a few people will ever pay for it, and for those people, it's _very_ useful. It's the same kind of idea as why AutoCAD or AIDS drugs cost an arm and a leg for what doesn't cost much to actually 'produce'. If it was your job to know this kind of thing (say, sysadmin of a very large network), you'd pay it. Or rather, the company would.

  • Internet Traffic... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kr3m3Puff ( 413047 ) <me@@@kitsonkelly...com> on Saturday March 01, 2003 @09:07AM (#5412768) Homepage Journal
    Of course the traffic may not be to chase after obscure documents, but simply more larger files, more peer-to-peer, more p0rn, etc...

    I wonder if the traffic can be correlated back to the actual number of "transactions" that are being done on the Internet? Like when I visit a website, a lot of the traffic (large banners, pop-up, etc) aren't really what I am doing or after.

    Is this simply a bandwith increase or are we talking about more real transactions? Probablly a bit of both...

    • Re:Internet Traffic... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Motherfucking Shit ( 636021 ) on Saturday March 01, 2003 @10:12AM (#5412926) Journal
      I wonder if the traffic can be correlated back to the actual number of "transactions" that are being done on the Internet? Like when I visit a website, a lot of the traffic (large banners, pop-up, etc) aren't really what I am doing or after.


      Is this simply a bandwith increase or are we talking about more real transactions? Probablly a bit of both...
      I'm sure it's a bit of both, but from my own experience, I really think the majority of the "growth" is the ever-increasing size of websites.

      One example I like to use is uo.stratics.com [stratics.com]. Check out how this site looked a few years ago [archive.org], courtesy of the Wayback Machine. It was about a 60KB download even then, but it's grown extensively since. I just saved the current version of the site as a "Web archive, single file" (.mht) in Internet Explorer, and it comes out to 491KB. That's without the two Flash ads - I have IE set not to load that junk, and it didn't save in the .mht, either.

      So, over the course of 4 years or so, a page that was once about 60KB is now >500KB if you add in the Flash banners. Is it any wonder that internet traffic keeps doubling, when the sizes of common web destinations keep increasing so much?

  • New much more interesting unit of measurement (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Johan Veenstra ( 61679 ) on Saturday March 01, 2003 @09:16AM (#5412781)
    5.175 petabits is about 1 bit per square centimeter of earth.

    Johan Veenstra

  • 64000 lines of code per day? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Your infinite number of monkeys is too small! (That, or the typewriters broke)

    --
    Account, no thanks, got enough already

  • Lifetime of thoughts = 37Gb (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RobotWisdom ( 25776 ) on Saturday March 01, 2003 @09:22AM (#5412793) Homepage
    James Joyce's Ulysses is supposed to offer a full day's thoughts by Leopold Bloom. I did some calculations [robotwisdom.com] and concluded that the overall size of 1.5Mb is about right... so a full lifetime of thoughts is just 37 gigabytes.

    If the Library of Congress is 10 terabytes that's less than 300 lifetimes' worth. (Which 300 people should be included?)

    Another useful measure is the EB, or Encyclopaedia Britannica, which is about 200Mb. So one LoC = 50,000 EBs = 300 lifetimes.

    • hmm (Score:2)

      by dsanfte ( 443781 )
      You didn't take into account the amount of visualization (images) a person does during a day. That's thinking too.
      • what about all the memories? you have 5 senses and your brain tries to remember as much as it can. A lifetime of memories has to take up a ton more space than just what the person is thinking.
        • Not that we need to get off on this tangent, but the brain actually tries to store as little as possible. Faces are recignized as basic shapes, lines and colors for example. Transient and peripheral sensory input is simply processed for a moment (to keep alert for dangers) and then discarded.
          IF the brain tried to store every detail it would become unnecessary to ever study or re-read something as a student, a time when the brain is most able to learn new things.

      • Great... (Score:2, Funny)

        by handsomepete ( 561396 )
        "You didn't take into account the amount of visualization (images) a person does during a day. That's thinking too."

        So now we have to figure out if we think in jpeg, gif or png?
    • Another useful measure is the PoS, which is the amount of meaningless statistical crap dropped on average by each slashdotter per day.

      E.G., this post contains one PoS, and so I've fulfilled my quotient.

    • Re:Lifetime of thoughts = 37Gb (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Twistor ( 174197 ) on Saturday March 01, 2003 @10:10AM (#5412922)
      I agree that the Library of Congress ("LOC") is a extremely rough measure, and so this thread is a bit silly ... but let not that stop a correction or two on slashdot!

      From 1986 to 2000 I worked part-time/full-time in the stacks in the Adams Building. I worked in the General Collections which, when I left, had 240 miles of shelving assigned to it. (The General Collections was/is contained in the Adams and Jefferson Buildings as well as several off-Capitol Hill storage facilities.) In all three buildings there were about 530 miles of shelving for all of the collections (General + Special Collections.)

      Trust me - when I left we were shelving books on the floor on every deck in both buildings. The 240 mile estimate for the General Collections is low. I only viewed two of the Special Collections up close - some of the Music Division & Law Library, and they too had storage problems - they routinely took some of our shelves for their own overflow material. But, of course, not all shelves contain the same amount of data, so (again) the memory estimate of the "LOC" is going to be suspect - don't think I didn't try many times (in those long ago hours of boredom shelving those books!) to quantify an average. Its close to impossible.

      The Library did try an estimate - they even asked us to suggest "typical" shelves in the General Collections with which to measure - but the final estimate did not satisfy me and I fear the typical LOC unit measure is itself low.

      If you ever get stack-access go down to Deck 8 North and look through the Encyclopedias - I would estimate the length of one set of EB to be 10 feet. There are 2,798,400 feet in 530 miles, so there are 279,840 EB's per LOC (and again that LOC measure is suspect...), or 1679 lifetimes.

  • What about Broadband? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by physman ( 460332 )
    It is intresting to consider that nobody yet has considered the rise in broadband (especially in the UK) on the rise in internet traffic. Whereas previously the standard 56K (if you where really lucky) restricted internet usage it terms of download speed and bandwidth, broadband has opened it up and now massive files (e.g. whole Linux distriubtions) can be downloaded in less than a day.
  • They predict that internet traffic will be 64,000 LOC/day! Wow, 64000 LOC, that sure sounds impressive!!

    Just take a friendly guess where they are all going! Slashdotting anything and everything stepping on their way..

  • Oh NO!!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by warmcat ( 3545 ) on Saturday March 01, 2003 @09:58AM (#5412885)
    64,000 LOCs/day!?!?!

    What happens when it goes past 65,535 LOCs/day!!!

    Does IPv6 fix this?
  • And if it is compressed what type of compression do they use?

    What storage format are they basing this on? 1 LOC from Microsoft word compare to 1 LOC from say Open OFFICE would have radically diffrent sizes..

    If they are going to pull some value out there rear and name it, the least they can do is provide full technical details on that unit of measurement.
    • 530 linear miles, assuming 100 pages (200 sides) per inch, mostly black-and-white, average 6x9 inch pages, works out to about 1.5MB per side, which would correspond to something like 150dpi, 1-bit b/w scans.

      Since a fair amount of the LOC is text, compressed OCR could cut the size of an LOC by a factor of 1000.

      OTOH, if everything is hypothetically rescanned with a nice 48-bit, 2400dpi scanner into PNG format, it could go up by a factor of 500.

      Glenn

  • I wonder what percentage of that astounding amount of traffic was actually created (written, composed etc.) by the sender.

    These days, most people know that "multimedia" and "software demos" make up a large chunk of internet traffic. Most of this is copyrighted by someone else.

    If only there were a practical and legal way to store this information in a central depository. With widespread multicasting, the sheer amount of internet traffic would be greatly reduced.

  • How much of IDC's numbers are based on new users versus page bloat?

    Just from the increase in graphics, flash, and java in web pages alone could acount for a doubling in bandwidth per year. Back in the Mosaic days Web pages were so light compared to what they are today.
  • Just like with the VCR, the porn industry gives consumers something they really want to consume. If the porn industry made HDTV 1080i on-demand video available for download, I'll bet HDTV and broadband would quickly become commonplace almost overnight!

  • Look at peering statistics (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 01, 2003 @11:02AM (#5413069)
    Have a look at the traffic statistics of the public peering points in Europe:

    LINX - London - 25Gbit/s [linx.net]
    AMSIX - Amsterdam - 11Gbit/s [ams-ix.nl]
    DECIX - Frankfurt - 10Gbit/s [de-cix.net]

    If you look at it most of them double traffic even faster than in 12 month. I think it's closer to 9 month.

    --
    Andre

  • Bizarre math? Fuzzy math? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by petrilli ( 568256 ) on Saturday March 01, 2003 @11:05AM (#5413079) Homepage
    180 petabits per day? What kind of measurement is that? Where was it measured? How was it measured? Who was included? Were bits counted twice?

    Just to give you an idea, I work for a large IP carrier, and we peak around oh, 200Gbps aggregate traffic entering the network. Gigabits/second is a good measurement of traffic, as is total gigabytes/terabytes... but to use the term petabit, implies they're using bandwidth, not data, and that asks where that was measured and how? There's not a lot of 200Gbps networks in the world.
  • This report was obviously written before the US anticompetitive DSL ruling. What effect will DSL gouging by the baby bells have on consumer adoption rates? I don't have the bucks to buy the report and see if they factor in pricing.

  • Slight potential issue here... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Shoten ( 260439 ) on Saturday March 01, 2003 @11:30AM (#5413183)
    Keep in mind that IDC sells the document that details this fact. They also sell other things that put it in their best interest for this report to say what it does. After all, do you think they'd be much use to anyone as an intelligence gathering organization if they only had to report "nope, not much going on here!" Remember, whenever someone talks about something that they are selling, consider that the statements should be verified before taken as fact :)

  • Early estimates didnt include spam (Score:3, Informative)

    by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Saturday March 01, 2003 @11:32AM (#5413198) Homepage Journal
    This is the single largest reason traffic is increasing out of sight, and was never on anyone's prediction list.

    Disclaimer: Spam includes mail, popups, popunders, etc.

  • Some Calculations (Score:4, Interesting)

    by hburch ( 98908 ) on Saturday March 01, 2003 @12:01PM (#5413314)
    Current data:
    180 petabits/day = 22.5 petabytes/day = 273 gigabytes/sec.

    Presuming 250 million people using the Internet, that's 1118 bytes/sec for each person, or 92 MB/day. Are you doing your part?

    2007 prediction:
    5,175 petabits/day = 650 petabytes/day = 7.66 terabytes/sec.

    Presuming 1 billion people using the Internet, that's 7,850 bytes/sec per person, or 647 MB/day. An average of one CD per day per person.

  • P2P (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gmuslera ( 3436 ) on Saturday March 01, 2003 @12:04PM (#5413328) Homepage Journal
    Even counting spam and mailing lists, increased average web page size, and streaming, I think the main component of this usage should be P2P networks, is the only thing that I could think that transfer so much traffic between a very large amount of people.

    If that is true, and all continues more or less the same, by 2007 consumers traffic will count for more than just 60%

  • should be enough (Score:4, Funny)

    by farnsworth ( 558449 ) on Saturday March 01, 2003 @12:13PM (#5413358)
    64,000 LOC should be enough for everybody.

    *ducks

  • LOC? (Score:2)

    by jonr ( 1130 )
    I am not impressed. 64.000 lines of code? What is that? One Linux kernel source?
    (attempt at humour)

  • Meal stop! (Score:3, Funny)

    by KC7GR ( 473279 ) on Saturday March 01, 2003 @12:54PM (#5413514) Homepage Journal
    Can I get a couple of bagels to go with those LOCs? Onion or blueberry, please...

    Thanks!

  • Petabit nonsense... (Score:3, Funny)

    by jpetts ( 208163 ) on Saturday March 01, 2003 @01:16PM (#5413616)
    Everybody knows this is nonsense: it's only two bits, 1 and 0, but moving very , very fast!

  • 64000LOC? (Score:2, Funny)

    by jrivar59 ( 146428 )
    How many natalie portmans is that?
  • Personally, I think we should use "whole internets" as storage measurements. They would be just as accurate as LOCs, I bet. And the great thing is, the basic unit would increase in size over time.

    So you right now, a $200 hard drive could store, maybe, 46 picoWOIs, and in the future, a $200 hard drive might still store 46 picoWOIs, since the size of the internet goes up!

    Or how about 'brainfulls'? About the amount of information that can be stored in a human brain. That would be kind of cool :P. we'd have to figure out how much can actually be stored, of course...

  • would be the juggernaut full of DATs, to renew the old adage about bandwidth.

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