Re: How big is the Internet?

[Leo Bicknell <bicknell () ufp org>]

On Aug 15, 2013, at 1:27 PM, Patrick W. Gilmore <patrick () ianai net> wrote:

> My laptop at home is an edge node under the definition above, despite being behind a NAT. My home NAS is as well. 
> When I back up my laptop to my NAS over my home network, that traffic would be counted as "Internet" traffic by your 
> definition.
>
> I have a feeling that does not come close to matching the mental model most people have in their head of "Internet 
> traffic". But maybe I'm confused.

It matches my mental model.  Your network is connected to the Internet, that's traffic between two hosts, it's Internet 
traffic.

Let's take the same two machines, but I own one and you own one, and let's put them on the same network behind a NAT 
just like your home, but at a coffee shop.  Rather than backups we're both running bit torrent and our two machines 
exchange data.

That's Internet traffic, isn't it?  Two unrelated people talking over the network?  They just happen to be on the same 
LAN.

My definition was arbitrary, so feel free to argue another arbitrary definition is more useful in some way, but for my 
arbitrary definition you've applied the rules correct, and I would argue it's the right way to think about things.  In 
a broad english sense "IP packets traversing an Internet connected network are Internet traffic".

It's all graph cross sections.  "Peering" volume totals a set of particular links in the graph, omitting traffic from 
your laptop to your file server, or your NAS to your laptop.  My model attempts to isolate every edge on the graph, and 
generate the total sum of IP traffic crossing any Internet connected network, which would always include all forms of 
local caches (Akamai, Google, Netflix) and even your NAT.  I think that's a more interesting number, and a number 
that's easier to count and defend than say a peering or "backbone" number.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell () ufp org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/