Re: How big is the Internet?

["Patrick W. Gilmore" <patrick () ianai net>]

On Aug 15, 2013, at 00:19 , Sean Donelan <sean () donelan com> wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Aug 2013, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:

> > It is actually even harder than the above illustrates. Most people define "Mbps on the Internet" as inter-AS bits. 
> > But then what about Akamai AANP nodes, Google GGC nodes, Netflix Open Connect nodes, etc.? They are all inside the 
> > AS. Given that Akamai claims to be 20% of all broadband traffic, Google is on the same order, and NF claims to be 
> > 30% of US peak-evening traffic, it seems like it would be foolish to ignore this traffic.
> >
> > I could go on, but you get the point. Definitions are a bitch.
>
> Some of that may help explain why the Internet traffic estimates seem to be too high or too low since about 2007. The 
> primary data sources for
> the Internet traffic estimates seem to be mostly Internet backbones and Internet exchange points.
>
> I hadn't been paying attention until I looked at a bunch of companies' investor filings this week because the size of 
> the Internet was in the news.  If you add up the percentages that companies are telling investors and policy makers, 
> you end up with more than 100%. Most of the companies' investor reports don't explain % of what.  But the few that
> do, end up pointing back to the same traffic forecast reports.  That doesn't even get to the "long tail" of small 
> providers that don't report anything.
>
> Either there is a lot of traffic missing, or market concentration is much greater than assumed.

I am not at all surprised the sum of percentages is > 100.

User on Joe's-DSL-and-Bait store sends a packet up through Mary's-backbone-and-coffee shop to 
Bill's-other-transit-and-sandwich cart which finally lands on Comcast. (Didn't see that coming, did you? :)

All four networks are going to claim that packet, but a true accounting of "petabytes downloaded per day" will only 
count it once.

-- 
TTFN,
patrick

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