[ih] Ingrid Burrington on North Virginia

[Vint Cerf]

on the assumption that not much traffic is black holed (could be a bad
assumption, I know), then the total traffic injected into any network that
is part of the Internet could be considered "Internet traffic." The low
black hole assumption means that the injected traffic comes out somewhere
on a network of the Internet, so you only need the one measurement to avoid
double counting.  That could include local traffic on a WiFi LAN if the LAN
is connected to the Internet. As far as I know, no one has any ability to
measure all that traffic that because not all the devices or networks of
the Internet are monitored for traffic. The 70% figure reminds of long ago
estimates of traffic going through the MAEs. When the Internet was
basically any network connected to NSFNET (after the retirement of the
ARPANET), NSF made public the amount of traffic injected into or ejected
from the NSFNET. That would be like Craig Partridge's cutpoint (the
boundary of the NSFNET). So for a short time there might have been a
somewhat credible notion of total Internet traffic but that time is long
gone.

On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 2:40 PM, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:

> > 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
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