are these people canidates for boxes?
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Continued Internet Traffic Growth Portends
Upswing In Carrier Spending, Says Internet Founder
– The Internet is still growing fast enough to exceed the capacity of carrier networks' current architectures, according to latest updated research by Dr. Lawrence Roberts –
San Jose, Calif. – January 16th, 2002 – The Internet has continued to grow, even in the face of economic slowdown and terrorist attack, according to new traffic measurements released today by Internet founder and respected network scientist Dr. Lawrence Roberts. And the continued growth in Internet traffic has contributed to shaping the IP carrier competitive landscape in unexpected ways, the research found.
Latest data from the 20 leading tier 1 IP network service provider networks in the U.S. reveals that the Internet has continued to grow at roughly the same growth rate it's been averaging since it began growing aggressively in the early 90s. Over the almost two-year period of Roberts' study, April 2000 through the present, Internet traffic has been found to be growing annually by a factor of three.
Traffic had been found to be growing even faster in the first period of Roberts' analysis, April 2000 through April 2001. Over that one-year period, traffic was measured to have grown at a factor of four. In the context of the research team's longer measured time period, however, the 4x growth was a temporary anomaly on an otherwise smooth 3x curve.
"A longer sample illustrates how Internet growth rate fluctuates over time. There are peaks of faster growth and troughs of slower growth, but the overall growth rate since we started collecting our data is consistent with the Internet's historical 1990s growth rate," said Roberts. "The longer sample period also illuminates factors that affect the growth rate, such as seasonal variation, business developments in the industry and other factors."
Roberts' findings run counter to some networking vendors, analysts and media that have suggested the growth of the Internet is slowing. The confusion stemmed from statements and speculation on the capacity of carrier networks, not the traffic across them. Other reports have confused growth in carrier revenue with growth in traffic, or assumed direct relationships between the two. Roberts' work is the first scientific measurement of traffic data since The U.S. National Science Foundation ceased tracking American Internet traffic in 1995.
Research Methodology
Service providers traditionally keep network traffic statistics confidential for competitive reasons. However, as the first scientist to prove packet networking's viability, and as the founder of the first commercial data packet carrier, Roberts has special access to top scientists at the leading data carriers. Beginning in 2000, Roberts and his team obtained non-disclosure agreements with the top 20 tier 1 Internet backbone carriers and began polling them for their network topologies and trunk utilizations.
While carriers rarely measure the traffic on their networks using uniform metrics, each carrier carefully maintains data on line utilization, or how "full" each trunk is. Roberts and his researchers derive their standardized measurements by knowing the size of carriers' trunks, their utilization and the topology of each carrier"'s IP network (knowing the topology yields a "hop count", an important factor in determining actual traffic.) The data supporting these most recent findings came from network samplings from April 2001 through early 2002.
Implications And Surprise Findings
"The biggest implication of these findings is that carriers are going to be spending again soon. There are scientific limits to how much their networks can handle before performance degrades to levels that customers will no longer accept. Yet, while spending will resume in the near future, carriers' economics unfortunately aren't going to get any better if they continue to build their networks with today's equipment," said Roberts. "Today's core routers are the bottlenecks. If traffic is continues to grow at these rates, carriers will soon be unable to build networks and turn a profit. This equipment actually creates a "diseconomy of scale" for network engineers trying to grow their networks beyond a certain point," Roberts stated.
A surprise to researchers was how their data illustrates how fragmented and hyper-competitive the tier 1 backbone ISP market has remained. "In December of 2001, one carrier was the clear leader on the basis of network capacity. Today, 11 of the top 20 tier 1 backbone carriers are roughly equal; each has 4.4% to 8.8% of total network capacity," said Roberts. "There may be industry consolidation in the future as traffic growth slows, but as long as traffic continues to grow faster than trunk speeds, the market will likely continue to stay open to new service provider entrants," he commented.
Roberts presented his findings today in a keynote address at a CIBC World Markets conference in San Francisco co-hosted by Stephen Kamman, CIBC's Executive Director, Networking & Internet Infrastructure. A summary of Roberts" findings can be downloaded from the website of his latest venture, Caspian Networks, at www.caspiannetworks.com.
About Lawrence Roberts
USA Today calls Dr. Lawrence Roberts "one of the 'true fathers of the Internet'." Roberts led the team that designed and developed ARPANET, the world's first major computer packet network, which evolved into the modern Internet. Roberts started the first data packet carrier, Telenet, which eventually became the data division of Sprint. Today, Roberts is the founder, chair and CTO of Caspian Networks, a high-profile networking startup. His full bio can be found at www.caspiannetworks.com/roberts/ ; web and print-ready photos can be found at www.caspiannetworks.com/pressroom/imagelibrary/executiveteam.shtml
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