Well, here we have it: WorldCom was lying and intentionally misleading about how "internet traffic doubles every 3 months." They of course deny it, saying in the article that they were only misunderstood when they started touting this cornerstone mantra stat of the internet. I think there was no question that, for years, everyone thought they meant TRAFFIC was doubling every 3 months. Alas, they say they meant to say only that their network capacity was doubling every 3 months. Bastards!
My only further comment is that until only this year, i think, the folks at lightreading.com and other pundits started to realize that, oh my, there is indeed a bandwidth glut. i personally always wondered, "if there is no glut, how come bandwidth prices are dropping so fast?" and likening it to the supply & demand dynamics of the DRAM market which i was more familiar.
online.wsj.com
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The statistic sprouted up in reports by industry analysts, journalists and even government agencies, which repeated it as if it were the gospel truth. "Internet traffic," the Commerce Department said in a 1998 report, "doubles every 100 days."
Except that it didn't. Analysts now believe that Internet traffic actually grew at closer to 100% a year, a solid growth rate by most standards but one that was not nearly fast enough to use all of the millions of miles of fiber-optic lines that were buried beneath streets and oceans in the late-1990s frenzy. Nationwide, only 2.7% of the installed fiber is actually being used, according to Telegeography Inc. Much of the remaining fiber -- called "dark fiber" in industry parlance -- may remain dormant forever.
That capacity glut has sent bandwidth prices plummeting an average of 65% each of the last two years.
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WorldCom officials now concede that Internet traffic rarely, if ever, was doubling every 100 days, but they deny the company intentionally provided misleading data. Instead, they insist that number referred to total capacity of the company's backbone network, which was growing extremely fast as UUNet raced to keep up with a flood of orders from Internet service providers and others in the mid and late 1990s.
"The actual traffic growth was never close to 1,000% per year," says Vint Cerf, an early Internet architect who is a senior vice president at WorldCom. "But I don't think it was an attempt to misstate anything -- it was an honest characterization of what kind of demand we were seeing from these companies."
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