IP: Re: 100% per year, etc

[Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>]

>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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