Questioning the coming Internet clog

One of the nation’s top authorities on global Internet traffic growth says his latest data show no reason to fear network capacity shortages, as traffic growth may even be slightly decelerating.

Updating data collected from Internet exchanges around the world, professor Andrew Odlyzko, director of the University of Minnesota’sInterdisciplinary Digital Technology Center,reported late last week that Internet traffic rates in the US and globally are continuing to grow at a rate between 50% and 60% (largely unchanged from recent years) -- rapid growth that nonetheless belies dire predictions of an escalation that would clog today’s networks.

“There is still not [sic] sign of the threatened deluge that was supposed to clog the Internet,” Odlyzko wrote in an email late last week announcing the new data. “Growth rates, if anything, are tending down.”

Last November, Nemertes Research released a study claiming that demand for Internet service could outpace network capacity as early as 2010.

In an interview with Telephony this week, Odlyzko said, “Traffic growth is still quite fast, so in some sense you could say yes, we’re on the way to the exaflood or we’re already in it. The issue is: Is this a reason for panic or action or throwing money at service providers so they could build out new links, etc., and the answer is no, because this growth rate, 50% per year, can be accommodated with essentially the current level of capital investment. We see more of a slowdown than a speed-up.”

Odlyzko now estimates average US monthly Internet traffic to be between 900 and 1550 petabytes per month, up from 750 to 1250 petabytes at the end of last year.

Though traffic growth tends to be higher in the second half of each year than the first, Odlyzko said the industry might consider focusing more on stimulating traffic growth rather than fearing it, an argument he voiced to Telephony last year.

Among the factors limiting Internet traffic growth, Odlyzko said, are the pace of broadband deployment, which he said is “not that fast” in some countries, including the US. But in other places, such as Hong Kong, where deployed bandwidth is much greater, traffic growth rates are slowing.