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Japan: Web Traffic Growth Slow
Friday, 24 October 2008 07:06
IIJ finds traffic downJapan's Internet traffic is not exploding despite p2p, YouTube video, and the fastest networks in the world. A definitive study finds "Contrary to this popular claim, technically solid reports show only modest traffic growth worldwide." http://www.iijlab.net/~kjc/papers/kjc-conext2008.pdf. It's based on the most extensive data ever collected about Internet traffic, provided by the largest carriers in the country with the best fiber coverage in the world (IIJ, SoftBank Telecom, K-Opticom, KDDI, NTT Communications, and SoftBank BB.)  Japan was the first country where fiber to the home customers passed DSL customers. Since the Japanese have had high speeds earlier than anyone outside Asia, this is a good look into the future of western networks,

The total bandwidth costs at large carriers are probably dropping,  That's definitely true at two of these carriers. Moore's Law brings down the cost per bit at 25-40% per year, easily keeping pace with the 27% growth in traffic. 27% would be fabulous in other industries, but on the net that represents a slowdown. The exaflood fears are hype from paid advocates; everyone close to the networks know they are wildly exaggerated. There's much more in the report by Kenjiro Cho of IIJ, Hiroshi Esaki of the University of Tokyo, Akira Kato of Keio University and Kensuke Fukuda of NII / PRESTO JST:
  • Traffic in the evening is now heavier, corresponding to prime TV watching times. Sandvine is finding a similar trend. Just two years ago, U.S. video traffic peaked at lunchtime and at the end of workdays, when many stopped for a quick YouTube fix.
  • "peer-to-peer users ... are slightly decreasing in population and volume share. ...A plausible explanation is that residential traffic is shifting from peer-to-peer file-sharing to video services." "peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic grew 29% in volume but the volume share dropped from 60% in 2006 to 51% in 2007." At AT&T and some other DSL networks, the file sharing percentage is now closer to thirty percentage. A new Sandvine paper finds p2p was 61% of upstream, but a far lower share of downstream. Sandvine's customer base has been predominantly cable, and I believe that cable has significantly more p2p than DSL.
  • the outbound has grown much faster than the inbound.
  • "Japanese ISPs ... now have more headroom in the backbone capacity than 5 years ago"
There are real issues in some networks. Cable upstream is limited until full DOCSIS 3.0, although the data I have suggests it actually a very minor problem that has been wildly exaggerated for the D.C. debate.. Carriers too small to efficiently run their own fiber backhaul are in trouble, because their costs are often 5 and even 12 times as high as those with scale.




Last Updated on Wednesday, 26 November 2008 01:34