nanog mailing list archives

How big is the Internet? - Results


From: Sean Donelan <sean () donelan com>
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2013 15:44:21 -0400 (EDT)


Thanks for all the comments. Through the entire thread on-line and off-line only one person contributed an estimate

Patrick Gilmore said:
  All that said: My back-of-the-envelope math says the Internet is order
  of 1 exabyte/day, as defined by my own rules on what counts as "the
  Internet"[*].  I could easily be wrong, but you asked.

  [*] I count Company-to-Company traffic. This is _mostly_ inter-AS
  traffic, but on-net nodes (e.g. Akamai, Google, NF) -> Provider _do_
  count. Things like Google -> Google over Google backbone do not count.
  Things like as701 -> as702 would count, but not as701 -> as701, even if
  the traffic is between two single-homed customers. It is a weird
  definition, but that's how I define it. (Although I may be biased,
  since counting only inter-AS traffic leaves off $SOME_PERCENTAGE of the
  traffic from my company.)

Since there weren't any other estimates to choose between, looks like I'll go with Gilmore's number. Gilmore's estimate was signifcantly lower than Cisco's VNI.


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