Weather exaggerated: no sign of video flooding the Internet but mobile data is brewing up a storm

Posted By TelecomTV One , 25 November 2008 | 3 Comments | 0 people rated this an average of 3/5

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The University of Minnesota's latest Internet traffic report (Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies - MINTS) says it can see no sign of the video floods predicted by some quarters to be threatening the stability of the Internet, but mobile data is definitely on the upswing.

MINTS pulls together a huge variety of data - anecdotal, financial and technical - from different regions and organisations to get a feel for real traffic growth across the Internet backbones.

The utility of MINTS is sharpened for many observers by the realisation that it was drastic over-estimation of the growth of Internet traffic that lay behind the over-build of network capacity in the late 1990s and therefore the devastating telecoms crash of 2001.

So behind the interest in MINTS is a palpable sentiment of 'never again': the industry may well boom and bust, but next time it won't be because of bandwidth demand miscalculations.

The gist of MINTS latest report, filed on its website on Sunday, is that global wireline traffic shows no sign of moving up from its "approximately 50 to 60 per cent per year growth rate". If anything, the trend lines point down, not up, says MINTS.

The MINTS report says: Switch and Data, which operates the PAIX Internet exchanges, reported on Oct. 13, 2008 that its traffic grew 112% over the previous year, but that its estimate for worldwide traffic growth was just 65 per cent.Equinix reported that in the U.S., its total network access traffic grew 34 per cent compared to the previous year. Cogent, which had experienced an actual traffic decline in the second quarter, reported that it resumed growth in the third quarter, with traffic growing 5 per cent compared to the second quarter, and 24 per cent compared to a year earlier.

European Internet exchanges showed traffic growth of 56 per cent from Aug. 2007 to Aug. 2008, compared to 84 per cent over the previous year... and so on.

However, wireless data growth was massive. "In Oct.

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(1) 21 November 2008 14:40:08 by Ted Ritter Greetings, Thank you for covering the Nemertes Internet study. Please note that we are an independent research firm and the study is not commissioned. We urge you and your readers to read the report since we never predict the Internet will grind to a halt, as you portray, rather the potential slow down of innovation as access lines become congested. We also discuss issues related to Internet routing that may have much greater consequence than the physical bandwidth issues. The full study is available here for a free read: http://www.nemertes.com/internet_interrupted_why_architectural_limitations_will_fracture_net Thank you for your consideration. -Ted Ritter, Nemertes Research
(2) 21 November 2008 21:41:08 by Karl Bode "Please note that we are an independent research firm and the study is not commissioned...We urge you and your readers to read the report since we never predict the Internet will grind to a halt, as you portray, rather the potential slow down of innovation as access lines become congested." True, but your work is being cherry picked by the Internet Innovation Alliance, an AT&T front group in the States...to suggest this potential "Exaflood" (a term forged by the same U.S. think tank that created the term "intelligent design") is unmanageable with reasonable upgrades and requires everything from a shift to metered pricing, to fewer industry taxes and huge subsidies. The original author is correct in noting that this is, largely, a manufactured crisis being used by lobbyists to justify policy positions.
(3) 25 November 2008 15:13:58 by Fred Perkins Lest the marketeers get overly excited that their long-awaited boom in mobile video has finally arrived, let's not forget that a large amount of 'mobile' traffic is NOT to mobile phones,nor of video, but is via cellular modems, typically connected to PCs. Add to that the traffic generated by Blackberries and clones, and it's clear that a very large percentage of the growth is coming simply from the use of wireless connectivity to the internet to access internet-based or accessible DATA. So please, researchers, start segmenting the data usage into meaningful buckets !

(1) 21 November 2008 14:40:08 by Ted Ritter

Greetings,
Thank you for covering the Nemertes Internet study. Please note that we are an independent research firm and the study is not commissioned. We urge you and your readers to read the report since we never predict the Internet will grind to a halt, as you portray, rather the potential slow down of innovation as access lines become congested. We also discuss issues related to Internet routing that may have much greater consequence than the physical bandwidth issues. The full study is available here for a free read:

http://www.nemertes.com/internet_interrupted_why_architectural_limitations_will_fracture_net

Thank you for your consideration.
-Ted Ritter, Nemertes Research

(2) 21 November 2008 21:41:08 by Karl Bode

"Please note that we are an independent research firm and the study is not commissioned...We urge you and your readers to read the report since we never predict the Internet will grind to a halt, as you portray, rather the potential slow down of innovation as access lines become congested."

True, but your work is being cherry picked by the Internet Innovation Alliance, an AT&T front group in the States...to suggest this potential "Exaflood" (a term forged by the same U.S. think tank that created the term "intelligent design") is unmanageable with reasonable upgrades and requires everything from a shift to metered pricing, to fewer industry taxes and huge subsidies.

The original author is correct in noting that this is, largely, a manufactured crisis being used by lobbyists to justify policy positions.

(3) 25 November 2008 15:13:58 by Fred Perkins

Lest the marketeers get overly excited that their long-awaited boom in mobile video has finally arrived, let's not forget that a large amount of 'mobile' traffic is NOT to mobile phones,nor of video, but is via cellular modems, typically connected to PCs. Add to that the traffic generated by Blackberries and clones, and it's clear that a very large percentage of the growth is coming simply from the use of wireless connectivity to the internet to access internet-based or accessible DATA.

So please, researchers, start segmenting the data usage into meaningful buckets !

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