Re: Google wants to be your Internet

[Marshall Eubanks <tme () multicasttech com>]

Hello;

On Jan 20, 2007, at 1:37 PM, Rodrick Brown wrote:

> On 1/20/07, Mark Boolootian <booloo () ucsc edu> wrote:
> > Cringley has a theory and it involves Google, video, and  
> > oversubscribed
> > backbones:
> >
> >   http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070119_001510.html
>
> The following comment has to be one of the most important comments in
> the entire article and its a bit disturbing.
>
> "Right now somewhat more than half of all Internet bandwidth is being
> used for BitTorrent traffic, which is mainly video. Yet if you
> surveyed your neighbors you'd find that few of them are BitTorrent
> users. Less than 5 percent of all Internet users are presently
> consuming more than 50 percent of all bandwidth."

Those sorts of percentages are common in Pareto distributions (AKA  
Zipf's law AKA "the 80-20 rule").
With the Zipf's exponent typical of web usage and video watching, I  
would predict something closer to
10% of the users consuming 50% of the usage, but this estimate is not  
that unrealistic.

I would predict that these sorts of distributions will continue as  
long as humans are the primary consumers of
bandwidth.

Regards
Marshall

> --
> Rodrick R. Brown