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

[Patrick W. Gilmore]

On Jan 12, 2016, at 4:41 PM, Ofer Inbar <cos at aaaaa.org> wrote:
> 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 :)

Actually, a very large percentage (40? 60? 80?) of Akamai / Google / Netflix traffic does cross an AS boundary. Akamai has put out stats about how much traffic traverses 0 (on-net), 1 (direct peering), and higher number of AS boundaries. Not sure if they still do, or if the other two publish those stats.

Since this is the Internet History list, let’s just give a nod to Akamai for being the first to put servers -inside- eyeball networks at scale. I know for a fact Google copied the Akamai idea down to the contract since I personally handed the Google person Akamai’s AANP contract. Did the same for Verisign, but while Verisign is clearly ‘core’ to the Internet, their traffic volume is not relevant.

Netflix obviously copied the idea as well, but I did not hand Dave the contract.

One could claim these companies would have come up with the idea on their own, and one would probably be right. But Akamai did it first, and by quite a few years. Credit where credit is due and all that.

For a while Akamai was the largest source of traffic on the ‘Net. They are now probably third. However, the top three are the same order of magnitude, dozens of Tbps, while number 4 is probably low single digit Tbps. Which isn’t surprising. If the top 3 are 60-80%, there isn’t much left for anyone else.

-- 
TTFN,
patrick

P.S. Before anyone thinks I’m tooting my own horn, I did not come up with the AANP idea. It was well established by the time I joined. I think Avi Freedman had a hand in its inception, but could not swear to that.