MINTS - Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies

The press is full of alarms about "exafloods" of traffic, primarily video, that might overwhelm the Internet. This is motivating calls for new business models, with many implications for issues such as "net neutrality" (see MW2007, And2007, MI2007, and McC2006). But there is very little solid data about what is happening on the network, and many conflicting estimates. As one striking example, at the end of 2005, John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco, claimed that Internet traffic was growing at about 100% per year Boslet2005, and similar claims are common (e.g., Roberts2006). Chambers also predicted both in 2005 and in a keynote at the NXTcomm conference in June 2007 Chambers2007, Duffy2007 that growth might accelerate towards 300 to 500% per year, and that the internal Cisco corporate network traffic load is currently growing at such rates. On the other hand, in August 2007, Cisco released a pair of white papers Cisco07a and Cisco07b which estimate that worldwide Internet traffic growth has been around 50% per year over the last few years, and project similar growth for the next few years. (See also the article DW2007 that draws on the Cisco white papers and other sources.) Thus even within a single company, and one that plays a central role in making the Internet function to boot, there are wide disparities in growth estimates, between 50 and 100% per year for current growth rates, and between 50 and 500% per year going forward. And there are some far more outlandish estimates floating around, including a Converge! Network Digest story that claims current Internet traffic is about 1,000 times as high as it actually is. So how can anyone make reasonable plans for the future? And in particular, how can we avoid on one hand a capacity crunch that strangles vital communications, and on the other hand another debacle like that of the turn of the century, when well over a hundred billion dollars was wasted in the United States alone building networks on the false assumption of "Internet traffic doubling every 100 days"?

MINTS - Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies