Torrents of traffic and the Internet backbone

Keeping pace? By Nate Anderson
Published: April 13, 2008 - 11:49PM CT

There's nothing worse than showing up to class only to be confronted by a pop quiz for which you haven't studied, but don't worry; this one will be pretty painless. It's only two questions long. Here's the first one.

Which of the following statements are true of US Internet traffic growth since 2000:

1. Internet traffic growth has increased exponentially year-over-year
2. Internet traffic growth has held steady year-over-year
3. Internet traffic growth is falling year-over-year

Question number two also concerns Internet traffic growth, but with a special focus on P2P. Hands on your buzzers? Here we go.

Which of the following statements is true of P2P growth over the last several years:

1. It is growing at 1,553 percent per year
2. It is growing at 690 percent each year
3. It is growing at 100 percent each year

A prominent strain of recent argument has claimed that the Internet is headed for an "exaflood" of traffic (which will soon be measured in exabytes＊), largely coming from the rise of online video, and that the ISPs and backbone providers are in danger of having their levees knocked down.

For the answers and complete story, click on the link below

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/exaflood-not-happening.ars

TheHalf™

＊ An exabyte is 2 to the 60th power, or 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes.

It can be estimated as 10 to the 18th power, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. An exabyte is 1,024 petabytes and precedes the zettabyte unit of measurement. While a 64-bit processor can theoretically use 16 exabytes of address space, exabytes are so large, the units are rarely used in a practical context. For example, it is estimated that all the printed material in the world only takes up about five exabytes.