[ih] Total Internet traffic [was: Ingrid Burrington on North Virginia]

[Ofer Inbar]

On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 02:57:50PM -0500,
"Patrick W. Gilmore" <patrick at ianai.net> wrote:
> For instance, if you sample a large enough set of
> “broadband” ISPs in certain countries, you can
> find that the vast majority of traffic going down DSL/Cable modems
> come from 3 companies (Google, Netflix, Akamai). Is that
> “all” traffic? Of course not, but it is a
> valid, useful statistic.

And most of that traffic is edge-cached.  Netflix, Google (it's mostly
YouTube I'm pretty sure), and I think Akamai as well, place their most
popular highest-volume data in file servers co-located in a lot of ISPs.
So most of that traffic probably never crossed an AS boundary or went
over a backbone.  Yet it wouldn't make sense to measure overall Internet
traffic volume without counting the majority of YouTube+Netflix, would it?

In other words, using reasonable common-sense definitions, most
Internet traffic doesn't go over the Internet :)
  -- Cos