Lectures notes for 2010 - KTH

Growth rates
Some people think the Internet bandwidth explosion is relatively recent, but right from the
beginning it’s been a race against an ever-expanding load. It isn’t something you can plan
for. In fact, the notion of long-range planning like the telcos do is almost comical. Just last
month, a local carrier asked us why we didn’t do five-year plans, and we said, “We do-about
once a month!”
-- Mike O’Dell 1 VP and Chief Technologist UUNET
Mike points out that the growth rate of the Internet is driven by the increasing
speed of computers, while telcos have traffic which was proportional to the growth
in numbers of people (each of whom could only use a very small amount of
bandwidth).
• by 1997 UUNET was adding at least one T3/day to their backbone
(this growth was 45Mb/s/day)
1. from http://www.data.com/25years/mike_odell.html {no longer a valid URL}
Maguire Growth rates 1: 32 of 104
maguire@kth.se 2010.03.21 Internetworking/Internetteknik