[ih] Ingrid Burrington on North Virginia

[Jack Haverty]

> the text includes:
> 	Today, up to 70 percent of Internet traffic worldwide travels through this region

I don't understand how anyone can make any quantitative statement about
worldwide characteristics of the Internet.

I'm curious how people actually measure "Internet traffic worldwide" in
order to be able to draw such conclusions.

If you accept Vint Cerf's definition of the Internet - paraphrasing as
"communications between devices using TCP/IP" - how does someone measure
that traffic?   For example, I have lots of devices on my own LANs which
send terabytes of information around the house over TCP. I bet you do
too.  And the company you work for.  Who's measuring all that
traffic...?   And how are they doing it?

Same question about other "worldwide" statistics, like number of
attached computers, number of users, etc.

Yes, it is sad that marketing-generated "factoids" like "up to xxxx" is
so easily interpreted as hard facts.

Back in the 80s when the Internet was young, we didn't have the
capability to take such measurements with any confidence of accuracy or
completeness.  When did that change.....?

/Jack Haverty