Interesting People mailing list archives
IP: Re: 100% per year, etc
From: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Date: Mon, 04 Dec 2000 04:53:20 +0900
Date: Sat, 2 Dec 2000 09:05:29 -0500 (EST) From: Andrew Odlyzko <amo () research att com> To: farber () cis upenn edu Cc: bill.st.arnaud () canarie ca, mo () UU NET Subject: Re: IP: 100% per year, etc Dave, Apropos Mike O'Dell's message that you sent out to the IP list on Thursday, he wrote:I see people still don't really understand the difference between offered load (measured as gigabits injected into the edge of the network) and network capacity (measured in gigabit-route-miles of trunking).This was apparently in reference to your note about my paper about Internet traffic growth myths, <http://www.cisp.org/imp/november_2000/odlyzko/11_00odlyzko.htm>. However, that paper was not confused about the two measures he cites, and explicitly concentrated on the end-to-end traffic as measured in bytes (which is closely correlated with O'Dell's first measure, "offered load," and much more weakly related to network capacity). The popular myths of Internet growth invariably speak of "traffic," as in the book "You Say You Want a Revolution" by the former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, where he recently wrote, ``In 1999, data traffic was doubling every 90 days ...,'' or in two separate articles in the November 27 issue of Fortune magazine. Now I would claim that when people speak of car traffic, they do not refer to the number of lanes on a highway, or the length of a highway. Similarly I would claim that when people talk of Internet traffic, their notion corresponds more closely to either byte volume or offered traffic, than to network capacity. Thus by considering byte volume and showing that it is about doubling each year (which is consistent with Mike O'Dell's statement that on his network, offered load about doubles each year), I feel I am correcting a widely held misapprehension of what is happening on the Internet. Best regards, Andrew ************************************************************************ Andrew Odlyzko amo () research att com AT&T Labs - Research voice: 973-360-8410 http://www.research.att.com/~amo fax: 973-360-8178 ************************************************************************
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