Two-Year Study of Global Internet Traffic
Arbor Networks (along with the University of Michigan and Merit Network) have put together the “Internet Observatory Report” which they say is the largest study of global Internet traffic ever. The report analyzes two years worth of detailed traffic statistics from 110 large and geographically diverse cable operators, international transit backbones, regional networks and content providers.
While the report includes discussion around significant changes in Internet topology and commercial inter-relationships between providers; analysis of changes in Internet protocols and applications; it is the concluding analysis of Internet growth trends and predictions of future trends that provides the most interesting food for thought.
Whereas five years ago, Internet traffic was distributed fairly evenly across tens of thousands of web sites and servers around the world, most content has now clustered around a small number of very large hosting, cloud and content providers.
Out of the 40,000 routed end sites, 30 large companies (what Arbor calls “hyper giants”) like Limelight, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and YouTube now generate and consume 30% of all Internet traffic.
In addition, while Internet applications historically communicated across numerous application-specific protocols and communication stacks, just a few web and video protocols now dominate (including video over web and Adobe Flash). Arbor says other mechanisms for video and application distribution like P2P (peer-to-peer) have declined dramatically in the last two years (this drop seems to be what most people are focusing on, but I personally don’t find it that surprising).
The report’s final key finding is that macroeconomic forces have “radically transformed” the global Internet ecosystem. A wave of innovation is ongoing, says Arbor, with service providers now offering everything from triple play services to managed security services, VPNs and increasingly, CDNs.
I can’t help but agree strongly that these changes in particular have significant and ongoing implications for backbone engineering, design of Internet scale applications and research.
