Is Internet Usage Surging?
Study by ARPANet founder insists dramatic growth is back

August 16, 2001 -- A surprising new study by an Internet pioneer has found that Internet traffic has grown faster than ever in recent months, contradicting widely held views that Internet growth has slowed.
Dr. Lawrence Roberts of Caspian Networks says his new research is based upon actual scientific data, rather than anecdotal evidence or the financial performance of equipment vendors.
As a leader of the team that developed ARPANET, which evolved into the modern Internet, Roberts says he was able to gain unusual access to top scientists at leading carriers.
By signing non-disclosure agreements with the top 19 carriers, Roberts' team was able to access information about their network topologies, trunk utilization and traffic. Network traffic was sampled in April and October of 2000 and April of 2001.
Roberts said his data for that 12-month period show that traffic has been doubling every six months on average across core IP service providers' networks. That equates to an annual growth rate of about 400 percent. That growth has been driven primarily by businesses, said Roberts, whose findings are summarized in a PowerPoint presentation available on his company's web site.
"There's been a lot of supposition and educated guessing, but remarkably little actual data on what's been happening at the core of the world's networks," says Roberts. "The National Science Foundation used to track U.S. Internet traffic, but stopped in 1996. Our work is the first scientific study quantifying Internet traffic across the leading carriers since then."
The rate of Internet growth has been the subject of debate for years. In the late 1990s, many analysts and business executives cited figures that Internet traffic was doubling every three months.
That oft-cited number has been challenged recently by researchers including Andrew Odlyzko of AT&T Labs, who says Internet growth has held steady at 100 percent annually - doubling about every 12 months - since 1997. Odlyzko cites similar findings by research firms Ovum and Probe Research, while acknowledging findings by RHK Inc. that cite a 200 percent annual growth rate.
"The story of Internet traffic doubling every three months is a fable that seems to hava risen from a rather brief spurt of traffic growth in 1995-96," Odlyzko writes in Internet Growth: Myth and Reality.
The new findings run counter to the experience of many networking vendors and observations of analysts, who have maintained the growth rate of Internet traffic has slowed recently.
According to Roberts, these accounts stem from confusion about the capacity of carrier networks, as opposed to the actual traffic that runs across them. Other analyses, he maintains, assume a direct relationship between carrier revenue and growth in traffic.
Roberts believes his findings have major implications for service providers and communications equipment vendors.
"Carriers have been holding back on purchases due to spending constraints," said Roberts. "Recently, some had been growing their capacities by redeploying equipment and capacity they'd previously acquired for OC-192 testing. But this borrowed time is about to run out – if traffic continues to grow at rates like these, network buildouts will need to continue soon."
Roberts is not without an interest in the rate of carrier buildouts. His new venture, Caspian Networks, is developing an "IP superswitch" that it hopes to sell to global carriers. Roberts unveiled his findings Wednesday in a joint webcast with Merrill Lynch, one of Caspian's investors. The company's other backers include Lucent, WorldCom, Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures and Salomon Smith Barney.

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