Internet Host and Traffic Growth

• Has the Net Stopped Growing?, New York Times/The Standard, June 30, 2001.

  But the Internet has matured, so more traffic is staying close to where it originates. In fact, UUNet reported that between 1997 and 1999, 30 percent of all U.S. traffic never crossed the national infrastructure but stayed within a local metropolitan network. ... Most analysts still see 50 percent to 100 percent annual growth in most regions. ... What they have found is that only a tiny fraction of fibers are lit - as little as 3 percent by some estimates. That seems to indicate a shocking overcapacity. In fact, according to telecommunications research firm Probe Research, perhaps only 14 percent of the fiber laid across the Atlantic may ever be needed.

• For offered load to double every year, network capacity must double
  every 4 months or so, at least in our network (UUNET).  It is slowing
  down a some, but that's still pretty fast.
  
  Consider an network of two nodes connected by one mile of fiber.  In
  this network, it's pretty clear that the number of gigabits of offered
  load should be equal to the number of gigabit-miles of trunking between
  the two nodes.
  
  Note that it's only the NUMBERS that are equal - the UNITS of the
  numbers are different.  One is gigabits/sec, the other is
  (gigabits/sec)*miles.  This means they can never be *equal*, but the two
  numbers can grow together - maybe even related by a constant of 1 mile,
  as in this case.
  
  Now consider a real network.  The network is much more complex than two
  nodes with one link, and each of those nodes is generating traffic which
  can go to any arbitrary destination node on a packet-by-packet basis.
  
  In North America alone, there are "35 NFL Cities" which account for a
  significant fraction of the population (people or computers, take your
  pick), but there are also many more computers located other places who
  also wish to have high-performance service.  This means the trunking
  must go a lot of places and be richly connected because...
  
  Every computer expects to reach every other computer with nearly equal
  quality.  While Warhole's Theorem is still relevant, on the Internet you
  are famous for 15 milliseconds, so who is famous changes very quickly.
  
  The resulting traffic slosh can be very large and the network trunking
  capacity (gigabit-route-miles) better be in place to handle it or Bad
  Things(TM) happen.
  
  The result is that for UUNET's network (I can't speak for others) to
  handle the 100% increase in gigabit/sec offered load over 12 months, the
  gigabits/sec-route-miles capacity of the network must increase 100%
  about every 4 months.  Again, note the difference in the units of those
  two numbers.
  
  Michael D. O'Dell
  

• Internet Growth: Myth and Reality, Use and Abuse, Andrew Odlyzko, November 2000.
• APNIC BGP statistics, including address space utilization:

  49.6% [of the IPv4 space] has been allocated. And around 61% of that allocated space is announced. [The allocation rate] at the moment seems to be around a /8 every 4 months (summing the activities of the 3 RIRs).

  (Philip Smith, Feb. 06, 2000)
• Large ISPs, Who's No. 2?
• Internet with Vint Cerf: "At UUNet, which is now a part of MCI WorldCom, traffic growth is even higher - about 1,000% per year. It doubles every 100 days, so the system architecture has to be redesigned - not just boosted - every year. Every year UUNet redesigns the basic network architecture."
• The Big Net Story Was Size Itself (NYT, Dec. 30, 1998): "IDC's data, derived from an annual survey of consumers and analysts, estimates that the number of people online has grown from about 9 million in 1995 to just under 52 million today. ... "Radio and black and white TV took between 8 and 10 years to reach 50 percent of households," he said. "If you count 1994 as year one of the Web, then we're doing just as well."
• It's Not the Size That Counts, But How You Measure It (NYT, July 5, 1998): "According to Gilder, web traffic across the Internet is about 133 times what it was just three years ago, and is 'currently running at about four petabytes [15 zeroes] per month, up from 30 terabytes [12 zeroes] at the time of privatization in April 1995.' .. O'Dell says UUNET's network traffic has been multiplying about 10 times per year. ... Eric Brewer, chief scientist for the Inktomi search engine, estimates that the Web includes about 200 million pages. As of December 1997, the Inktomi search index used by HotBot and other Inktomi partners contained 110 million full-text documents. ... AltaVista currently has 1.2 million Web sites in its database. ... Since March 1985, when the first one was registered, domain names have topped 4 million globally and continue to grow at about 60,000 per week. ... Nearly 50 percent of domains are registered to U.S. addresses, 6 percent to the U.K., 5.6 percent to Germany and 4.7 percent to Canada."
• Netsizer: interactive tool for the estimation of Internet growth
• The visualization study of the T1 NSFNET was done in 1992 by Donna Cox and Robert Patterson.
• Internet Monthly Reports cover the growth of the network, e.g., as the number of newly registered domains:

  year	month	INTERNIC registered	total in database
  1993	January
  1993	September
  1993	October	577	12,252
  1993	November	723
  1993	December	1,143
  1994	January	826
  1994	February	826
  1994	March	1,376
  1994	April	1,079
  1994	May	1,316
  1994	June	2,061
  1994	July	1,895
  1994	August	2,426
  1994	September	1,736
  1994	October	2,747
  1994	November	3,356
  1994	December	3,681
  1995	January	4,099
  1995	February	4,190
  1995	March	6,757
  1995	April	9,911
  1995	May	13,974
  1995	June	13,974
  1995	July	12,190
  1995	August	19,657
  1995	September	22,676
  1995	October	20,315
  1995	November	20,612
  1995	December	24,423
  1996	January	n/a (wrong IMR report)
  1996	February	n/a
  1996	March	34,933
  1996	April	45,102
  1996	May	48,954
  1996	June	55,433
  1996	July	n/a
  1996	August	n/a
  1996	September	n/a
  1996	October	n/a
  1996	November	n/a
  1996	December	70,020
  1997	January	91,758
  1997	February	90,885
  1997	March	98,581
  1997	April	116,366
  1997	May	102,056
  1997	June	112,661
  1997	July	138,814
  1997	August	120,900	1,769,781

• Table showing the relationship between GNP and Internet host count
• Graphs showing traffic growth of the NSFNET

• [MCI's] backbone ... carries an average of 110 terabytes of information per week at speeds of 622 mbps. Traffic is growing at 15 percent every month, according to the company.

  MCI
• CIDR report: number of ASes (roughly add 1000 AS/year, about 2700 as of 10/97), route table history
• BGP routing table dynamics
• Routing Table Size (LINX, UK)
• Growth of the German part of the Internet
• Lots of slides on network development and growth provided by the Internet Society
• Growth of the World Wide Web
• RIPE host count
• Internet domain survey; the numbers in parentheses reflect a new, IN-ADDR.ARPA-based, counting methodology that makes results of January 1998 not directly comparable to earlier results. Year-to-year ratio is computed as the ratio of two host counts (separated by half a year) squared. For the earlier results, the adjusted counts are compared.

  Date	Hosts	Growth (compared to 12 months)	Domains	Ratio Hosts/Domain	Replied to ping	% ping'able hosts
  Jul 2002	162,128,493	1.29
  Jan 2002	147,344,723	1.34
  Jul 2001	125,888,197	1.34
  Jan 2001	109,574,429	1.51
  Jul 2000	93,047,785	1.65
  Jan 2000	72,398,092	1.66
  Jul 1999	56,218,000	1.69
  Jan 1999	43,230,000	1.38			8,426,000	19.5
  Jul 1998	36,739,000	1.53			6,529,000	17.8
  Jan 1998	29,670,000	1.30			5,331,640	18.0
  Jul 1997	19,540,000 (26,053,000)	1.46	1,301,000	14.9	4,314,410	22.1
  Jan 1997	16,146,000 (21,819,000)	1.56	828,000	19.5	3,392,000	21.0
  Jul 1996	12,881,000 (16,729,000)	1.85	488,000	26.4	2,569,000	19.4
  Jan 1996	9,472,000 (14,352,000)	2.01	240,000	39.5	1,682,000	17.8
  Jul 1995	6,642,000 (8,200,000)	1.88	120,000	55.4	1,149,000	17.3
  Jan 1995	4,852,000 (5,846,000)	2.28	71,000	68.3	970,000	20.0
  Jul 1994	3,212,000	2.10	46,000	69.8	707,000	22.0
  Jan 1994	2,217,000	1.36	30,000	73.9	576,000	26.0
  Oct 1993	2,056,000	1.80	28,000	73.4
  Jul 1993	1,776,000	2.04	26,000	68.3	464,000	26.1
  Apr 1993	1,486,000	1.64	22,000	67.5	421,000	28.3
  Jan 1993	1,313,000		21,000	62.5

Observations (Harald Koch):

• There are alot more NAT capable firewalls out there these days; they are usually in the DNS (since many servers require it), and usually pingable, but they represent a large community of Internet-capable hosts.
• There are many "hosts" of the form: dial1x17.city.isp.net, which are really dial-in ports (and usually active), but which actually represent anywhere from 10-100 Internet capable hosts, depending on the ISP.

Last updated by Henning Schulzrinne