Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass the U.S.

Sun Sep 14 23:52:56 UTC 2008

> Pardon my ignorance here, but isn't this more of a case of traffic
> growing outside of the USA which means that traffic within the USA
> represents a smaller share of the total internet traffic ?
>   
I suspect so - especially with CDN/Content providers pushing traffic out 
to the edge it means that we (the rest of the world) don't pay so much 
to haul it back from Northern America!   (Thanks to those who are doing 
it - you know who you are and we love you for it!).

Japan has 80% of it's internet traffic as domestic, as do a lot of Asian 
countries.  As China, Korea and others grow their domestic volumes the 
%age coming from the USA is a lot less.
>
> Did western europe ever really have a primary route via the USA to reach
> asia  ? (I realise that during the cable cuts in middle east last year,
> traffic might have been rerouted via USA but this would be a temporary
> situation).
>   
Most Asian providers (at least Northern Asia) use USA, Atlantic path to 
get to Europe.  The capacity going Westt isn't that high in comparision, 
so the extra latency hit is well offset by the much reduced cost.   My 
point in my first post is that this is changing rapidly as people (eg 
Reliance/Flag) are building more capacity West to Europe plus the 
Trans-Russian terrestrial (eg. TEA) are going for fast (and expensive 
from my understanding).

For instance, out of Australia we have a single, old cable going West 
out of Perth to Singapore (SEA-ME-WE3) which allows only low speed 
circuits, but we've got almost 4 (as of next year) cables going North 
and East out of Sydney.   So most Europe traffic to/from Australia is 
via the USA.

MMC

-- 
Matthew Moyle-Croft - Internode/Agile - Networks
Level 4, 150 Grenfell Street, Adelaide, SA 5000 Australia
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